A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

(Ἀρχίλοχος), of Paros, was one of the earliest Ionian lyric poets, and the first Greek poet who composed Iambic verses according to fixed rules. He flourished about 714-676 B. C. (Bode, Geschichte der Lyr. Dichtk. i. pp. 38, 47.) He was descended from a noble family, who held the priesthood in Paros. His grandfather was Tellis, who brought the worship of Demeter into Thasos, and whose portrait was introduced by Polygnotus into his painting of the infernal regions at Delphi. His father was Telesicles, and his mother a slave, named Enipo. In the flower of his age (between 710 and 700 B. C.), and probably after he had already gained a prize for his hymn to Demeter (Schol. in Aristoph. Av. 1762), Archilochus went from Paros to Thasos with a colony, of which one account makes him the leader. The motive for this emigration can only be conjectured. It was most probably the result of a political change, to which cause was added, in the case of Archilochus, a sense of personal wrongs. He had been a suitor to Neobule, one of the daughters of Lycambes, who first promised and afterwards refused to give his daughter to the poet. Enraged at this treatment, Archilochus attacked the whole family in an iambic poem, accusing Lycambes of perjury, and his daughters of the most abandoned lives. The verses were recited at the festival of Demeter, and produced such an effect, that the daughters of Lycambes are said to have hung themselves through shame. The bitterness which he expresses in his poems towards his native island (Athen. 3.76b.) seems to have arisen in part also from the low estimation in which he was held, as being the son of a slave. Neither was he more happy at Thasos. He draws the most melancholy picture of his adopted country, which he at length quitted in disgust. (Plut. de Exil. 12. p. 604; Strabo xiv. p.648, viii. p. 370; Eustath. in Odyss. i. p. 227 ; Aelian, Ael. VH 12.50.) While at Thasos, he incurried the disgrace of losing his shield in an engagement with the Thracians of the opposite continent ; but, like Alcaeus under similar circumstances, instead of being ashamed of the disaster, he recorded it in his verse. Plutarch (Inst. Lacou. p. 239. b.) states, that Archilochus was banished from Sparta the very hour that he had arrived there because he had written in his poems, that a

man had better throw away his arms than lose his life. But Valerius Maximus (6.3, ext. 1) says, that the poems of Archilochus were forbidden at Sparta because of their licentiousness, and especially on account of the attack on the daughters of Lycambes. It must remain doubtful whether a confusion has been made between the personal history of the poet and the fate of his works, both in this instance and in the story that he won the prize at Olympia with his hymn to Heracles (Tzetzes, Chil. 1.685), of which thus much is certain, that the Olympic victors used to sing a hymn by Archilochus in their triumphal procession. (Pindar, Pind. O. 9.1.) These traditions, and the certain fact that the fame of Archilochus was spread, in his lifetime, over the whole of Greece, together with his unsettled character, render it probable that he made many journeys of which we have no account. It seems, that he visited Siris in Lower Italy, the only city of which he speaks well. (Athen. 12.523d.) At length he returned to Paros, and, in a war between the Parians and the people of Naxos, he fell by the hand of a Naxian named Calondas or Corax. The Delphian oracle, which, before the birth of Archilochus, had promised to his father an immortal son, now pronounced a curse upon the man who had killed him, because "he had slain the servant of the Muses." (Dion Chrysost. Orat. 33, vol. ii. p. 5.)

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