A LIFE OF ARCHILOCHUS

by Sannion

Of all the ancient Greek authors that have come down to us, Archilochos is probably my favorite. Considering that all we possess of his works is about 60 or 70 fragments – most of them no longer than a line or two, some consisting of just a few words – that's saying something!

Very little is known with certainty about the man's life. He was born on the island of Paros in the 7th century BCE, and was a contemporary of Sappho and Alkaios. His father, Telesikles, was from a noble family and had led the establishment of a colony to Thasos in obedience to an oracle from Delphoi. Archilochos hated it there and left as soon as he had the chance. He wrote that all of the evils of Hellas had converged on the spot, that it was full of ceaseless quarrels, and that nothing good would ever come from it. A quarrel with Lykambes, one of the city's most prominent citizens, may have contributed to Archilochos' hard feelings. The poet claimed that Lykambes had promised his daughter Nioboule's hand in marriage, only to go back on his word. Archilochos responded by writing venomous verse about the man and his daughters. According to one legend the force of his words was so great that the daughters ended up hanging themselves in shame. There's an important lesson there: you don't fuck with poets!

But by his own account, Archilochos was not just a follower of the Mousai – he also served Enualios, the god of war.

Archilochos made his coin as a mercenary soldier, fighting in the many border skirmishes of the islands and abroad. He saw death firsthand, and recorded it in an unflinching manner. His descriptions of battle and men tossed overboard to drown midst the wreckage of their ships are some of the most vivid and heart-wrenching accounts of battle to have ever been put to pen. Perhaps because Archilochos was in the thick of battle, and not just weaving poetic accounts from the safety of some feudal lord's court, he had a very different view of things, and rejected outright the Homeric conception of the heroic ideal. At one point Archilochos brazenly admits that he tossed aside his shield in order to flee from an enemy – a thing absolutely unthinkable for Greece's warrior elite.

Archilochos differed from Homer and Hesiod in many other respects. For one, he was very earthy and sensual, a man of fierce passions He delighted in wine and drunken frenzy, claiming that it was a source for his poetic inspiration. He could be exceptionally cruel in dealing with his enemies, launching into bellicose rants at the slightest provocation. In fact, he pioneered a whole poetic form to do just that.

Before his time all poetry had been written in hexameter verse. But Archilochos created the iambic – or as Hadrian called them "raging iambics" – modeled after the licentious taunts of the Eleusinian goddess Iambe. And as can be expected from such a name, a good deal of Archilochos' verse is concerned with bodily pleasures and accounts of his sexual escapades. In fact, in one of his most memorable lines he compares a prostitute giving him oral pleasure to a Thracian drinking his beer from a straw. That's not the kind of thing one normally expects to find in an ancient Greek author, and for many years the more colorful verses of Archilochos were left blushingly in the original Greek (or hidden under a polite veneer of Latin) lest they might corrupt impressionable Victorian youths.

And yet, Archilochos was not thought of as a gutter-mouthed reprobate in antiquity. His verse was highly esteemed for its innovation, its realism, its striking imagery.

He was held up as a model of exemplary style and copied by such greats as Horace and Juvenal. He received divine sanction at the most important religious sites in ancient Greece: one of his hymns was recited to the victors of the Olympic games, and when Archilochos fell in battle against the Naxians, his slayer Corax was cursed by the Delphic oracle for having slain a servant of the Mousai, forbidden ever again to set foot in a temple. Statues of Archilochos were erected alongside those of Homer, praising them as equals, and he was even the recipient of a hero-cult. As such, Archilochos deserves pride of place in the Library of the Ancients.