Archilochus was born on the island of Paros and lived, on the basis of references to dateable events in his poetry, between about 680 and 640 BCE. His main reputation in the later ancient world was as a writer of devastatingly insulting verses in iambics, a metre traditional for invective, but he was also a soldier, as this little selection of fragments in elegiac metre shows: by ancient tradition, he died fighting. All of the fragments have a convincing flavour of a soldier’s life, whether on board ship, anticipating battle or making a self-deprecating joke about having to abandon his shield to save his skin, a trope that was to be reproduced by other poets down the centuries, including Horace describing his service in Brutus’s army and its defeat at the battle of Philippi in Odes 2.7. Short as they are, each fragment gives a strong impression of character and personality. Archilochus is the first surviving Greek poet to take his subject matter from his own life and opinions, and the earliest of the Greek lyric poets.
The importance of wine in the fragments reflects a common feature of a soldier’s life in any age. It is Ismaric wine that Archilochus drinks, leaning on his spear; and it was Ismaric wine that Odysseus used to get the Cyclops drunk so that he could blind him in Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey. He writes these pieces in elegiac couplets, and their hexameter lines are something that he shares with Homer. Roman poets like Propertius were using pretty much the same metre six hundred years later.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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