Archilochus, Poet of Love and War
"I am the servant of the Lord Enyalios,
and skilled, too, in the lovely gift of the Muses."
What manner of man is it who makes this claim, some time in the middle of the seventh century B.C., in terms which resound down the centuries to our own time? Its author, Archilochus of Paros, is the first individual poet known to us in European history (apart, perhaps, from some personal details offered to us by Hesiod, who was probably composing a generation or so earlier), and as an individual personality, he certainly constitutes an impressive beginning. He is normally presented, reasonably enough, as a rebel and an innovator, the archetypal representative of a restless and disturbed period, the age of colonization and tyrants, when traditional societies and structures were breaking up, and new forms emerging. One can point to his restless life of fighting, brawling and love-making all round the Aegean, the anti-heroic attitudes expressed in his war poems, and the savage obscenity of much of his love (and hate) poetry. We seem to be in the presence of an aggressively individualistic figure, at war with traditional society, and struggling for his personal survival against all comers:
"By my spear I win my barley-bread;
By my spear I win my Ismaric wine.
Stopping to drink, I lean on my spear."
There is a good deal of truth in this picture, no doubt, but I would also like to draw attention on this occasion to an aspect of Archilochus that is not usually emphasized - his traditionalism, the extent to which he is not an innovator or a rebel, but rather a representative of a type which is fairly constant in Greek history, and already well represented in Homer's Odyssey. It would be absurd to try to deny that the seventh century was an age of upheaval, of vigorous colonization, of the overthrow of established aristocracies and the rise of tyrants, but I do want to introduce some modifications into our picture of Archilochus as an archaic Rimbaud or Dylan Thomas, in revolt against convention, the past, and Homeric ideals of excellence.
First, however, let us look at what we know of his life.[1] He was born, sometime around 680 B.C., [2] the son of one of the most prominent men on the island of Paros, Telesicles, whose grandfather had led a Parian expedition to colonize Thasos in the previous century, and who himself led a further settlement of Parians to found a city on the island. Archilochus was, however, the son of Telesicles and a slave-concubine called Enipo, probably a Thracian. He was thus illegitimate. This did not deprive him of citizen rights, as it would have later in Athens, but it did lessen his share of any property his father might leave, and lowered his status in society. Such a circumstance might well leave one with a chip on one's shoulder, or at least a certain feeling of alienation from society. We have no direct reference to the circumstances of his birth in Archilochus' surviving poems, but we know from a statement of Plato's cousin Critias that he did make reference to it somewhere. Critias, with the disapproval characteristic of an Athenian aristocrat, actually criticizes Archilochus for mentioning this (Fr. 44 D-K); he says:
“If Archilochus himself had not published such details to the Greeks, we would never have learned that he was the son of the slave-woman Enipo, nor that he left Paros because of poverty and frustration and went to Thasos, nor that when he got there he fell out with the inhabitants, nor indeed that he abused his friends and enemies alike; and moreover, we would not know, if we had not learned it from himself, that he was an adulterer, a sex-maniac, and a hooligan, and, most disgraceful of all, that he threw away his shield.”
Figures 1-4: Paros port; Cape Phocas; the Frankish Castro; narrow streets of modern Paros town (photo credits: Athanasios Vionis)
Sailing into Paros, if one has Archilochus in one's mind, is an exciting experience. First the misty outlines of the hills appear, rising up to the height of Profitis Elias (virtually all high mountains in the Greek islands, so far as I can observe, are now called after the Prophet Elias – probably as the successor of the sun-god Helios); then, as one rounds Cape Phocas, the little port of Parikia comes in view, the rows of white, flat-topped houses, clustered together, rising up to what would in Archilochus' time have been the acropolis, but was most recently a Frankish kastro (which, however, incorporates all too clearly sizeable chunks of its predecessors, including an ancient temple of Hera). Indeed, as, after disembarking, one wanders through the little town, one gets the impression of building piled on building, virtually from Archilochus' day to our own, without the general outline of the streets changing more than minimally. Why would they, after all? They have certainly not been widened much, except in a few cases, to accommodate modern traffic.
In fact, however, much has happened to disrupt the even flow of life since the rumbustious days of Archilochus in the late seventh century B.C. In later antiquity, and into the Byzantine era, the island enjoyed quiet prosperity, being chiefly famous for its marble, and recent archaeological finds testify to continuous industrial and trading activities despite Arab raids and the fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire. For over three hundred years, from 1207 to 1537, it was held by the Franks, as part of the Duchy of Naxos, and the island was then incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. During 18th century the rise of a middle class of seafarers and ship-owners led to substantial economic growth and increase in population.
However, one may be permitted to dream, and wandering about Paros with a copy of Archilochus' poems – or rather, the miserable fragments still surviving to us of those poems – in hand does, I think, add to one's appreciation of them.
The censorious catalogue from Critias quoted earlier will serve as a trailer for Archilochus' life story, but we must take events step by step. Apart from the fact of his birth, which probably took place around 680 B.C.[3] , the first story concerning him is very much of the folktale variety, though none the less interesting for that. We know of it from a most valuable inscription erected by one Mnesiepes, a pious Parian of the third century B.C., who says that he erected this inscription in a shrine to Archilochus, which he had built in obedience to an oracle from Apollo. The inscription was found only in 1949, and is now in the museum of Paros. It is unfortunately incomplete, but it tells a number of fascinating stories about Archilochus, attesting at least to the quasi-mythical stature he acquired in later times. The text runs as follows [4]":
"They say that once, when Archilochus was young, he was sent by his father Telesicles to the countryside, into the deme called Leimones, to bring a cow to market. He rose early, while it was still dark, and the moon was shining, and started to drive the cow into the city. When he came to the places called Lissides, he saw what he thought was a group of women. Thinking that they were on their way from the allotments (ἔργα) into town, as he approached, he addressed them teasingly (σκώπτεῖν). They received him with joking and laughter, and asked him if he was going to sell the cow. When he said he was, they said that they would give him a fair price for it. No sooner had they said that than neither themselves nor the cow were anywhere to be seen, but instead he saw a lyre lying at his feet. He was thunderstruck, but, when he gathered his wits after a little while, he realised that it was the Muses who had appeared to him and had given him the lyre, so he picked it up and went into town and told his father what had happened. Telesicles, when he heard the story and saw the lyre, was astonished. At first he instituted a search for the cow throughout the whole island, but could not find it. Later, however, when he had been designated by the citizens an official delegate (θεοπρόπος) to Delphi, along with Lycambes, to consult the oracle on behalf of the city, he went off all the more enthusiastically because he wished to make enquiry from the god about what had happened.
But when they arrived and were entering the place of prophecy, the god uttered to Telesicles the following oracle:
‘That child of yours will be immortal and famed in song,
Telesicles, among all men, who shall first address you
as you disembark from your ship onto your dear native land.’When they got back to Paros at the festival of Artemis, the first of his children who met and spoke to his father was Archilochus; and as they went home, when Telesicles asked him if any necessary provisions had been laid in, since it was late in the evening ..."
Here, unfortunately, the inscription breaks off. I have quoted this in full, since I find it interesting from many angles. First of all, despite the delightfully realistic details, we must recognise that we are in the realms of folktale. The general motif of meeting a god or goddess in disguise, and receiving a gift of some sort, is well enough known, but this particular story-pattern is hard to parallel in Greek tradition. The distinguished German scholar, Fritz Dornseiff[5], has drawn attention to the story of Saul's selection as King of Israel in the First Book of Samuel (I Sam: 9). Saul is sent out by his father with one servant to find some asses which have been lost. They travel far, and eventually find themselves near a city where the servant knows that there lives a prophet (in fact, Samuel). They decide to consult the prophet, and as they approach the city, they meet a crowd of maidens coming out to draw water, and ask them the way to the prophet's house. The maidens direct them. Samuel welcomes Saul, dismisses his anxiety about the asses by telling him that they had been found, and instead pours holy oil over his head, to anoint him king of Israel, despite his protests that he is of the tribe of Benjamin, the lowest of the tribes.
This parallel is certainly suggestive, though as it stands it is not very close. The maidens are just maidens, and they do not do any deals with Saul, nor are the asses exchanged for the kingship. But this story may well once have constituted a closer parallel, since many such tales are considerably 'laundered' and altered in the process of their absorption into the Old Testament. In any case, though, there can be no very close connection between the two stories; at most, they are remote variants of a single motif.
Some have suggested[6] that Mnesiepes took this story from one of Archilochus' own poems, it being his ironic account, answering to Hesiod's in the Theogony[7] (22-34), of his calling by the Muses to the practice of his craft. This is possible, but I do not believe it, as this is not how Mnesiepes presents it. He attributes it simply to oral tradition: "this has been handed down to us by men of old (hoi archaioi)". It is better that way, and testifies to the reverence in which Archilochus was held in later times by his fellow-citizens.
Fig. 5: Paros, landscape and seascape (photo credit: Athanasios Vionis)
One of the simple-minded things that I decided to do while visiting Paros was to explore the surroundings of the chief town, to see if any district answered to the ancient name Leimones, 'the Meadows'. In fact, just north of Parikia, there is a low, flat fertile plain adjacent to the sea. which is nowadays called 'Livadhia' ('the pastures’), and it is certainly a plausible candidate for the deme to which Archilochus had to walk out to get the cow. Whatever about the status of the story itself, the districts and landmarks mentioned in it must be authentic, if it was to have any force at all. Why is the place Lissides specified? It must have been a prominent landmark on the way into town, perhaps an outcrop of flat rock (if the word has anything at all to do with lis or lissas, a word describing a smooth rock), but I could not, unfortunately, on an admittedly superficial survey, come up with a suitable candidate. And how are we to understand the erga from which Archilochus thought the girls were coming? These at least, if they are allotments, are still there, but they are too vague a category of object to be identifiable. The whole story seems, however, to bring one close to the daily life of Archilochus' Paros, if not to any historical event, and that is why I value it.
But we must move on, to historically more secure events. We may note that Telesicles' companion on the delegation to Delphi, plainly a man of equally prominent status to himself, was called Lycambes. This was to be a fateful name in Archilochus' life. At some point, perhaps during the course of this very expedition, Lycambes apparently agreed to betroth his daughter Neoboule to young Archilochus (we may assume, from the circumstances of the folktale, that Archilochus was by this time in his late teens, and soon to come of age; one late source[8] says that he made the request himself). This engagement was subsequently broken off, by Lycambes' decision, and from that act much unpleasantness followed. We do not know why Lycambes took this step. Archilochus' illegitimacy can hardly have been the issue, since Lycambes, as an associate of his father's, must have known the family circumstances perfectly well, and the engagement would in that case never have come about in the first place. It may rather have been the result of Lycambes' increasing apprehensiveness about Archilochus' style of life. At any rate, this decision was a fateful one for Lycambes and his family, not least the unfortunate Neoboule. Archilochus was stung to the quick:
"I know how to love those who love me,
how to hate; my enemies I overwhelm with abuse.
The ant bites: there is truth in that saying."[9]"One sizeable thing I do know:
How to get back my own with a man doing me wrong"
(Fr. 126 Diehl = West)"The fox knows many tricks; the hedgehog one,
but a big one" (Fr. 201 West).
These fragmentary utterances are those of a man who does not appreciate being trifled with, and Lycambes was soon to find out what he was up against. Tradition has it that, in face of Archilochus' relentless barrage of satire and abuse, Lycambes and his daughters ultimately hanged themselves.[10] This grim report, though not very well attested, is a distinct possibility. Although we know of no tradition in Greece of institutionalized satirising on the part of poets, such as was the case in ancient (and even early modern) Ireland, and in other parts of the Indo-European world, notably India, it is possible that Archilochus is in fact playing an ancient Indo-European poetic role here, whether consciously or not. His fiercest attacks do not survive, although a recently published papyrus (the 'Cologne Papyrus')[11] preserves an extraordinary piece of character-assassination, to which we will return presently. However, a few fragments give one a taste of what Lycambes had to face:
"Papa Lycambes, what sort of notion has entered your head?
Who has knocked aside your wits
which before were so well fixed? Now indeed to all and sundry
You will appear an object of great mirth." (Fr. 172 West).
Another very fragmentary poem (Fr. 42 L-B = 54) seems to envisage Lycambes now begging Archilochus to take his daughter off his hands, and Archilochus derisively refusing: "Be smarter next time, miserable Lycambes!"; but this is probably fantasy. The unfortunate Neoboule was not left alone either. Archilochus seems to have on the one hand portrayed her as a clapped-out whore (as in the new Cologne fragment), and then on the other to have fantasised about possessing her. A much-quoted line is often translated: "Oh that I might touch Neoboule's hand (εἰ γὰρ ὣς ἐμοὶ γένοιτο χεῖρα Νεοβούλης θιγεῖν, Fr. 118), but the probability is that this rather wimpish aspiration on Archilochus' part is simply a mistranslation (whether one alters ‘χεῖρα’ to ‘‘χεῖριν’ with Elmsley, or leaves it as it is, as a sort of accusative of respect). What he is actually far more likely to be saying, I believe, is: "Oh that I might lay a hand on Neoboule", which is a rather different matter; and when it is conjoined with two other lines in the same metre which are preserved separately[12], but which I believe go with it, it produces a startlingly different sense:
"Oh, that I might lay a hand on Neoboule,
fall upon a compliant bag[13], and ram belly against belly,*
thighs against thighs."
The Cologne papyrus, which I have mentioned earlier, presents us with a bizarre scenario along similar lines to this. Archilochus imagines himself reclining in a meadow, not with Neoboule, but with Neoboule's younger sister, in the process of seducing her, and at the same time denigrating the charms of Neoboule herself (Fr. 196a)[14]:
Do not grudge me, my dear, a quiet entrance in beneath
your doorpost and your gateway; for I shall thus reach
grassy gardens. But now be quick assured: some other man
is welcome to Neoboule; I’m afraid she’s overdone;
her maiden flower has fallen away,
also the grace that she once had. She could never
get enough sex: the crazy woman has given proof
of the lengths to which she will go.
To blazes with her. Let no friend tell me
to have a wife like that, and be a laughing stock
to my neighbours: I much prefer you.”
And so on, culminating in a seduction scene hardly suitable for mixed company. We do not have to assume that Neoboule was other than a sweet young thing, the innocent victim of Archilochus’ feud with her father. All this is a product of the poet’s destructive rage.
But his battle with Lycambes and his family is only one aspect of Archilochus’ eventful life, though a notorious one. His capacity for cursing comes out well in another fragment (Fr. 79a Diehl) against someone who betrayed him[15]:
“May he lose his way on the cold sea
And swim to the heathen Salmydessos,
May the ungodly Thracians with their hair
Done up in a fright on the top of their heads
Grab him, that he know what it is to be alone
Without friend or family. May he eat slave’s bread
And suffer the plague and freeze naked,
Laced about with the nasty trash of the sea.
May his teeth knock the top on the bottom
As he lies on his face, spitting brine,
At the edge of the cold sea, like a dog.
And all this it would be a privilege to watch,
Giving me great satisfaction as it would,
For he took back the word he gave in honour,
Over the salt and table at a friendly meal.”
Fig. 6: Goodbye to Paros (photo credit: Athanasios Vionis)
While still in his twenties, partly, no doubt as a result of his unhappy relationship with Neoboule and her family, but partly also out of adventurousness, Archilochus left Paros for the place that his father had helped to settle a generation before: Thasos, a large and fertile island in the north Aegean, just off the coast of Thrace. He left Paros, it would seem, without much regret. It was even said in later times, as we learn once again from Mnesiepes[16], that the Parians expelled him for the virulence of his iambics, whereat they were punished with impotence by Apollo, and had to recall him. That is no doubt another fable, but a significant one, as attesting to the quasi-divine status which he later acquired. We have a few remarks about Paros preserved in the fragments:
“Goodbye to Paros, and those figs,
and livelihood dragged from the sea” (Fr. 116 West).
This is not complimentary, but a tiny fragment (Fr. 166) talks of “longed-for Paros” (ἱμερτὴ Πάρος) – if one can trust the restoration so he may have become homesick after a while.
Thasos, on the whole, despite what seems to have been unremitting conflict, he enjoyed somewhat more:
“This island, like the backbone of an ass,
stands up garlanded with wild woods.” (Fr. 21 West).
But, as Critias tells us[17] he quarrelled with its inhabitants – “thrice-wretched city”, he calls it (Fr. 228), and remarks (Fr. 102): “How the dregs of all Hellas has flowed together into Thasos!”
But plainly he spent an exhilarating time there. We do not know where the various friends he addresses in his poems come from – Pericles (Fr. 13,16, 124), Charilaos (Fr. 168), Erxias (Frs. 88, 89), Glaukos (Frs. 15, 48, 96, 105, 117, 131) – but they are probably companions in Thasos[18]. To Pericles he addresses a famous lament (Fr. 13 West); Glaukos, who seems from the inscriptional evidence to have been an important figure in Thasos, is the recipient of much advice and friendly teasing:
“Glaukos, a mercenary is your friend only as long as
he is in the battle.” (Fr. 15)“Look, Glaukos, look! The sea is stirred up deeply in waves,
and about the heights of Gyrae stands straight up a cloud,
sign of storm; fear falls upon us unawares.” (Fr. 105)
This poem is said by the authority who preserves it for us ( Heraclitus, in his Allegories of Homer 5,2), to be in fact an allegorical description of the onset of war, but it is a vivid image, probably of a storm cloud standing over the mountains of Tenos, as seen from the north coast of Paros on a clear day. Another fragment (131) gives expression to a thought characteristic of Archilochus’ life-style and of his whole world:
“The heart of mortal man, Glaukos, son of Leptines,
is what Zeus makes it, day after day.”
Fig. 7: Crouching warrior with his shield, tondo of black-figure kylix, c.560 BC
(Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Life in Thasos meant battle, more or less continuously, mainly against the Thracian tribes of the mainland, where the Greek colonists went in search of gold from the rich gold mines of Thrace, and for other booty, such as slaves. Sometimes things did not go well, and that is the context for one of his most famous and controversial fragments, the poem about the time he threw away his shield (Fr. 5):
“Some Saian mountaineer struts today with my shield,
blameless instrument, which I abandoned beside a bush.
But I saved my skin. What do I care for the shield?
The hell with it! I can get another just as good.”
As an assault on the ideals of Homeric chivalry, this was about as shocking as one could get. The story goes that on the head of this poem Archilochus and his poetry was banned from Sparta[19], where the prevailing ethos demanded that one come back from battle “with one’s shield, or on it”. But this utterance must not be understood as that of a coward, or of an unwarlike man of letters (as Horace, for instance, chose to interpret it later, when he threw away his shield at the Battle of Philippi). It is simply the attitude of the practical military man, who is fighting not for glory, but for survival and for booty. If you can get the jump on the Thracians, you slaughter them; if they get the jump on you, you run like hell. There will be another day. Another poem in the same vein is Fr. 114 West:
“I have no love for a great fancy general,
proud of his curled locks and his fine shave.
Give me a little fellow, stocky and bandy-legged,
sturdy on his feet and full of heart.”
Not all war is against Thracians. They fought the men of Naxos as well (Frs. 88-89, a sadly mutilated poem, of which the first line is preserved in a late metrical work. I give Guy Davenport’s spirited, though admittedly somewhat fanciful rendering (No. 175 in his collection):
“Erxias, Defender, how can we muster
Our scattered troops? The campfires
Lift their smoke around the city.
The enemy’s sharp arrows grow
Like bristles on our ships. The dead
Parch in the sun. The charges are bolder,
Knifing deep into the Naxos lines.
We scythe them down like tall grass
But they hardly feel our attacks.
The people will believe that we accept
With indifference these locust men
Who stamp our parents’ fields to waste.
My heart must speak, for fear
And grief keep my neighbours silent.
Listen, hear me. Help comes from Thasos,
Too long held back by Torone;
And from Paros in the fast ships.
The captains are furious, and rage
To attack as soon as the auxiliaries
Are here. Smoke hangs over the city.
Send us men, Erxias. The auguries
Are good. I know you will come.”
There also survives a respectful description of the martial habits of the Euboeans (Fr. 3):
“When the fight’s with those hard Euboeans,
No bow-string’s whine or snap of bow-notch
Or whip of sling do you hear, but a delirium
Of Ares, sword work and spear sticking,
The tall Euboeans famous for their knives.”
A good deal of Archilochus’ poetry, in fact, does have the public role of exhortation in battle (e.g. Fr. 128 West), or lamentation for those lost in battle, or at sea (Fr. 13). From battle one took relief in drinking and fornication. His descriptions of the latter are amusing, but once again, hardly suitable for mixed company. Drinking comes in for extensive celebration as well, though (Fr. 4, No. 191 Davenport):
“Kindly pass the cup down the deck
And keep it coming from the barrel,
Good red wine, and don’t stir up the dregs,
And don’t think why we shouldn’t be,
More than any other, drunk on guard duty.”
Or this one, teasing Pericles (Fr. 124):
“Like the men of Mykonos, Pericles,
You drink our unmixed wine, and pay for nothing.
You broke into the party, uninvited, and act as if among old friends.
Your stomach has tricked the brains in your skull,
And now you are shameless.”
There are also some charming vignettes of girls, probably dockside whores, but delicately presented, nonetheless:
“She held a sprig of myrtle in her hand,
and the fair flower of a rose. And her long hair
cast a shade over her shoulders and her back.” (Frs. 30+31)
“Against the wall, fists on hips,
They leaned in a fishnet of shadow.” (Fr. 36)
The pains of love are also dwelt on:
“Such a lust for lovemaking has slipped beneath my heart
and shed thick mist over my eyes,
stealing the tender wits from my breast.” (Fr. 191)“Miserable with desire
I lie lifeless
My bones shot through
With thorny anguish
Sent by the Gods” (Fr. 193)
But now to a matter with which I promised to deal at the outset: how far can Archilochus be seen also as a traditional poet? In considering this, we need to look not only at his language, but also at his subject-matter, and at the persona which he himself presents to the world.
As for his language, it is easy to see that he in fact owes much to Homer and to the epic tradition in general. To detail this here would be tedious, but it is worth noting that his use of Homeric turns of phrase was so striking to the ancient critics that we actually have, surviving on a scrap of papyrus, a compilation consisting of a series of lines of Homer and Archilochus juxtaposed, to illustrate the extent of his linguistic debt [20]. Nor indeed is there anything very strange about this. Even by Archilochus' day, in the seventh century B.C., people's heads were full of Homer, and when one came to compose poetry, in whatever metre, one naturally tended to resort to reminiscences of, variations on, and even parodies of, Homeric phrases.
What I am more interested in for the moment is the Archilochian persona, which has been widely presented, both in ancient and in modern times, as antithetical to that of the average Homeric hero – if one can postulate such a figure – his famous poem on the loss of his shield being cited as the prime illustration of this. There is a fair amount of truth in this, of course, but there is one aspect of the situation that is often disregarded, and that is that within the Homeric tradition we do have the portrayal of just such a figure as Archilochus himself exemplifies, indicating that the contrast between the world of Archilochus and that of Homer is not that great after all.
What I have in mind is the character presented by Odysseus in Odyssey Book 14, in the second of the lying 'Cretan' tales which he tells on his return to Ithaca, this time to Eumaeus the swineherd (14.199-359). It is a long, rambling tale, full of adventures. I shall just concentrate on a few significant features of it.
First of all, Odysseus presents himself as a bastard:
"From broad Crete I declare that I am come by lineage, the son of a wealthy man. And many other sons too were born and bred in his halls, true sons of a lawful wife; but the mother that bore me was bought, a concubine. Yet Castor, son of Hylax, of whom I declare that I am sprung, honoured me even as his true-born sons."
This is very much the position of Archilochus in Telesicles' household. Telesicles certainly seems to have accorded him equal honour with his legitimate sons. The problem for Odysseus' persona only arose after his father's death, and this may have been the case for Archilochus also.
"He (sc. Castor) was at that time honoured as a god among the Cretans in the land for his good estate, and his wealth, and his glorious sons. But the fates of death bore him away to the house of Hades, and his proud sons divided among them his substance, and cast lots therefor. To me they gave a very small portion, and allotted a dwelling."
Once again, very much the same portion may have been allotted to Archilochus, though we know nothing of this. In one respect, though, he certainly fared worse than Odysseus' persona. The bastard son of Castor made a good marriage: "But I took unto me a wife from a house that had wide possessions, winning her by my valour; for I was no weakling, nor a coward in the fight (211-13)." Archilochus, on the other hand, as we know, though betrothed to a girl of good family, Lycambes' daughter Neoboule, was cheated of his prize, and thereby hangs a whole dimension of his poetic achievement.
In either case, however, an ambiguous status in society provokes in our heroes a certain restlessness. The son of Castor presents himself as a lover of war and raiding (he particularly delights in a good ambush, 217), and declares an aversion to honest toil and domesticity ("labour in the fields was never to my liking, nor the care of a household, which rears good children, but oared ships were ever dear to me, and wars, and polished spears, and arrows -- grievous things, whereat others are wont to shudder."); even as Archilochus declares himself an aficionado of love and war. Even the famous incident of the throwing away of the shield is well matched in the career of the son of Castor. As Odysseus tells it, after only a month at home enjoying his wife and children after his ten years at Troy (his persona duly followed Idomeneus to Troy), our hero sets out for a raid on Egypt. After an initial success, things go badly. The Cretan raiders are outnumbered, and our hero decides to pack it in (276-80): "Straightway I put off from my head my well-wrought helmet, and the shield from off my shoulders, and let the spear fall from my hand, and went toward the chariot horses of the king. I clasped and kissed his knees, and he delivered me, and, setting me in his chariot, took me weeping to his home."
And so he lived to fight another day. There was no heroic cause involved here to justify fighting to the death. It was just an unpretentious bit of piracy, and the best thing to do was to try one's best to save one's skin. This our hero succeeded in doing, owing to the soft-heartedness and soft-headedness of the Egyptian king, and lived to fight another day, just as did Archilochus in Thrace.
This should point us, I think, to a fairly obvious truth: that there were in Homer's day (or Odysseus', for that matter), just as in the seventh century, men with Archilochus' attitude to life, just as there were men with Aias' or Diomedes' attitude to life. Archilochus is in revolt against many things, but not against the Homeric world as a whole.
Nor in fact is he in revolt against his own society as a whole. As I remarked at the outset, we should not look on Archilochus as some seventh century B.C. Rimbaud or Dylan Thomas. Like all ancient poets of whom we have knowledge, even Sappho in Lesbos, Archilochus has an important public dimension to him, and significant public roles to perform. Quite a number of his surviving poems or fragments are in fact concerned with incidents or issues of significance to society as a whole. For instance, the elegy to Pericles on those lost in a shipwreck (Fr. I Lasserre) is plainly a poem composed in his role as spokesman for society as whole, as are a number of his martial elegies and tetrameters, such as Fr. 9, in praise of the martial prowess of the Euboeans, or the famous poem to Glaucus about the ship of state mentioned earlier. These poems were plainly passed around the community from mouth to mouth, and widely cherished, which is why we have them. It is not even certain that Archilochus himself wrote them down, as opposed to declaiming them on some public occasion, and then relying on some 'remembrancer', such as used to accompany the great Bedouin poets of the pre-Muslim era, to copy them down.
One of the apparent paradoxes, indeed, of the ancient attitude to Archilochus, both among his own countrymen and among the Greeks in general in later ages, is the regard in which he was held as a source of quotations in matters of practical ethics and politics. This is not the way in which one would expect Greeks in general to honour a foul-mouthed rebel and misfit, such as he often portrayed. Certainly such figures as Pindar and Plato's cousin Critias have hard things to say about him, but in general he is accepted as among the pantheon of early Greek poets, as a spokesman for the Greek way of life and for the concerns of society as a whole.
The fact that pious legend credited him with being under the protection of the god Apollo, to the extent that the god punished the Parians for driving him out on one occasion, afflicting them with impotence until they apologised and recalled him, and punished a Naxian called Calondas, surnamed 'the Raven', for daring to kill him in battle, shows clearly, as indeed does the erection of a shrine in his honour in Paros in later times, that Archilochus was viewed, not as the archetypal outsider, but rather as the representative of one important facet of the Greek spirit. Again and again in later literature he is mentioned in the same breath as Homer and Hesiod, which is no small honour, and a fair index of the regard in which he was held. It was only the censorious judgement of late antiquity, and ultimately of Byzantine monks, which condemned him to oblivion, and which leaves us with the scattered quotations and frustrating scraps of papyrus from which we now have to try and put together some adequate impression of his genius.
[1] Chief sources for his life are conveniently collected in the Budé edition of F. Lasserre and A. Bonnard, Archiloque: Fragments, Paris, 1968. See also the German edition of Max Treu, Archilochos, Munich, 1959.
[2] The only secure date in his life is derivable from the eclipse of the sun of April 6, 648, which he is using as the basis of one of his poems (Fr. 122 West). Since this poem is described by Aristotle (Rhet. III 17, 1418b28) as “being uttered by a father about his daughter”, and that father is probably Archilochus’ bugbear Lycambes, father of his beloved Neobule, he must still have been fairly young when he composed it.
[3] If his mother was a Thracian slave, it is plausible that that Telesicles should have acquired her after his arrival in Thasos in 684, but we cannot be sure of this; at any rate such a date is consistent with what else we know of him.
[4] Test. 11a L-B.
[5] Theologische Literaturzeitung 7/8 (1955), 499-500. The tale does, I suppose, have some generic similarity also to the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, but the motif of being specially chosen in lacking in that story, though it does retain the concept of an overtly worthless exchange that turns out to lead to something -- not that the lyre is as worthless as a handful of beans!
[6] Cf. e.g. A. Kambylis, 'Zur Dichterweihe des Arkhilochos', Hermes 101 (1963), 129-50. There is a stimulating, but rather speculative discussion of the whole question in Archilochus and Iambic Poetry, by Carles Miralles and Jaume Portulas, Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1983, ch. 3.
[7] The analogy is quite close, except that the folktale motif of the 'worthless' exchange is lacking. Hesiod's Muses, after some initial good-humoured mockery, give him a staff (skêptron ), as emblem of the epic aoidos, but they do not demand his sheep in return.
[8] Porphyrion, In Hor. Epod. 6. 13.
[9] Fr. 35, 10-12 in the Budé ed. of F. Lasserre & A. Bonnard (P.Oxy. 2310, Fr. 1). [All translations borrowed from Guy Davenport's lively version, The Fragments of Archilochos, University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964.] The long but tattered fragment from which this comes embodies an address to a woman, who is being urged not to give credit to calumnies against the poet, and there is mention of a marriage later, in l. 23. If this woman is indeed Neoboule, then the reason for the break-up would seem to have something to do with Archilochus' military and political activities, not his personal origins. he himself mentions his noble ancestry in l. 9.
[10] Porphyrion, loc. cit. (Test. 18 L-B.)
[11] Available in M.L. West, Delectus ex Iambis et Elegis Graecis, Oxford, 1980 (Archil. Fr. 196a), and most conveniently, perhaps (with translation), as Appendix III to Hugh Lloyd-Jones' Females of the Species, London. 1975.
[12] In a scholion to Eur. Med. 679 (Fr. 119 West).
[13] This is an extraordinary, but vivid, expression: καὶ πεσεῖν δρήστην ἐπ’ἀσκόν.
[14] I borrow the witty translation of Martin Robertson (ap. Lloyd-Jones, Females, p. 101).
[15] The authorship of this poem is actually disputed, as between Archilochus and Hipponax, to either of whom it would be appropriate. Martin West, following Blass, assigns it to Hipponax; David Campbell, following its first editor, Reitzenstein, allots it to Archilochus, and I follow him. I borrow here the lively translation of Guy Davenport.
[16] Inscr. III 42ff.
[17] Fr. 295 West = Critias 88 B 44 Diels-Kranz. Cf. above, p. 2.
[18] Glaukos, at least, was buried there, and was honoured with a fine tomb which has been discovered.
[19] Plut. Lac. Inst. 34.
[20] Cf. Denys Page, Archilochus and the oral tradition, in Archiloque: Entretiens Fondation Hardt X, Vandoeuvres, 1964, pp. 119-163.
( https://www.fondationhardt.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Entretiens-10.pdf)
John Dillon
John Dillon is Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek, Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin; John held the Chair from 1980 until his retirement 2006. He is also the founder and Director Emeritus of the Plato Centre.