_THE SATIRISTS._
Invention of the Iambic Metre.--Archilochus.--His Parentage and
Life.--His Fame among the Ancients.--Ancient and Modern
Modes of Judging Artists.--The Originality of Archilochus
as a Poet.--Simonides of Amorgos.--His Satire on
Women.--The Ionian Contempt for Women.--Hipponax.--Limping
Iambics.--Differences between the Satire of the Greeks and
Romans.
The Greeks displayed their æsthetic instinct in nothing more remarkably
than in their exact adaptation of the forms of art to the nature of
the subjects which they undertook to treat. The hexameter had sufficed
for the needs of the epic. The elegiac had fulfilled the requirements
of pathetic or contemplative meditation. But with the development
of the national genius a separate vehicle for satire was demanded.
Archilochus of Paros created a new style, and presented in the iambic
metre a new instrument to the poets of his race. The circumstances of
the birth and parentage of Archilochus are significant. He was the son
of Telesicles, a noble Ionian, and of Enipo, a slave-woman. Thus from
the very first there were inequalities in his circumstances which may
have sufficed to sour his temper. His birth, which may be fixed about
729 B.C., was predicted, according to old tradition, by the oracle
at Delphi. The same oracle busied itself at a later period with his
death, by cursing the Naxian soldier Calondas, who had killed him
in battle, because he had "slain the servant of the Muses." As the
fragments we possess of Archilochus render it difficult to understand
the very high estimation in which he was held by the Greeks, and which
these stories indicate, it may be well to preface this account of
him with some quotations from the ancient critics. Longinus,[65] to
begin with, explains the incongruities of his poetry by saying that he
"dragged disorderly elements into his verse under the impulse of divine
inspiration." Plato[66] calls him #ho sophôtatos Archilochos#, "the
prince of sages," which, in the mouth of a philosopher, is the highest
panegyric. The Alexandrian critic Aristophanes, when asked which of the
poems of Archilochus he liked best, answered with laconic brevity, "the
longest." Hadrian,[67] in an epigram, says that the Muses turned the
attention of Archilochus to mad iambics, in order that their darling
Homer might not have so dangerous a rival in the field of the epic. All
antiquity agreed in naming him second only to Homer: "Maximus poeta aut
certe summo proximus," "a poet of the highest order, or surely next
unto the greatest," says Valerius Maximus. The birthdays of Homer and
Archilochus were celebrated on the same day; their busts were joined
in Janus fashion--two faces and one head: Hippodromus the Sophist[68]
called Homer the Voice, Archilochus the Breath or Soul, of the students
of wisdom. The epithet #kallistos# (most beautiful) was ascribed to
him because of his perfect style, though the subjects of his poetry
were anything but beautiful. Of this style Quintilian[69] says that it
excelled in "powerful as well as short and quivering sentences," that
it contained "the greatest possible amount of blood and sinews." The
highest praise which Gorgias could pronounce on Plato when he published
his dialogues upon the Sophists was to say that Athens had produced a
new Archilochus. To multiply these panegyrics would be easy. But enough
has been adduced to prove that the ancients looked on Archilochus as
a worthy rival of Homer, as a poet supreme in his own department, as
the creator of a new kingdom in poetry, as the sire of a long line of
mighty artists.
What remains of the verse of Archilochus and what we know of his
life are curiously at variance with this enthusiasm. Nothing proves
the difference between ancient and modern views of art more strongly
than the fact that all antiquity concurred in regarding as a divinely
inspired benefactor of the human race a man who in the present day
would have been hunted from society with execrations. This son of the
slave-woman, born in an Ionian island, where license was more tolerated
than in a Dorian state, devoted himself to satire, making his genius
the instrument of private hate, and turning the golden gifts of the
Muses to the service of his selfish spite. A greater contrast cannot
be conceived than that which exists between Homer, the priest of gods
and heroes, the poet of high actions and lofty passions, whose own
life is buried in sacred and sublime mystery, and this satirist who
saw the world with jaundiced eyes, prying about for subjects of his
wrath and bitterness and scorn, whose themes were the passions of his
own heart, the sordid misadventures of his personality. It was this
contrast between Archilochus and Homer that gave the former a right
in the estimation of the Greeks to take equal rank with the father of
the epos. He, the greatest poet next in date to Homer, by virtue of a
divine originality of genius, exercised his art in exactly the opposite
field to that which Homer ruled as his demesne. Clearer sign than this
of inspiration could not be demanded; and how should posterity withhold
its gratitude from the poet who had unlocked a new chamber of the
treasure-house of art? This was how the ancients reasoned, instead of
measuring their poets, as the moderns try to do, by moral standards and
conventional conceptions of propriety.
The facts in the life of Archilochus are briefly these. He was engaged
to be married to Neobulé, daughter of Lycambes. Her father retracted
his consent to the marriage, having possibly discovered that the temper
of his proposed son-in-law was a mixture of gall, wormwood, vinegar,
verjuice, vitriol, and nitric acid. Thereupon, as Horace says:
Archilochum proprio rabies armavit iambo.[70]
He made the iambic metre his own, and sharpened it into a terrible
weapon of attack. Each verse he wrote was polished and pointed like
an arrow-head. Each line was steeped in the poison of hideous charges
against his sweetheart, her sisters, and her father. The set of poems
which he produced, and, as it would appear, recited publicly at the
festival of Demeter, were so charged with wit and fire that the country
rang with them. The daughters of Lycambes, tradition avers, went
straightway and hanged themselves--unable to endure the flight of fiery
serpents that had fallen on them; for, to quote the words of Browning,
Archilochus had the art of writing verse that "bit into the live man's
flesh like parchment," that sent him wandering, branded and forever
shamed, about his native streets and fields. After this murderous
exhibition of his power, Archilochus left Paros.[71]
Away with Paros! her figs and fishy life!
He removed to Thasos, where the Parians founded a colony. But Thasos
was worse than Paros:[72] "Like the backbone of an ass, it stood
bristling with wild wood; for, in sooth, it is not a fair land, or
pleasant, or delightful, like that which spreads by Siris's stream."
It was here he threw his shield away in a battle with the Thracians,
and gave Horace and Alcæus a precedent by writing a poem on his want
of prowess. The remainder of his life was spent in wandering. He
visited Sparta, where, however, he was not suffered to remain an hour.
The Ephors judged rightly that this runaway soldier and foul-mouthed
Ionian satirist might corrupt the Spartan youth, or sow dissension
in the State. The publication of his works was forbidden in this the
most conservative of all Greek states. Finally Archilochus returned to
Paros, and was killed in battle by a native of Naxos. A more unhappy
existence, wretched in itself and the cause of wretchedness to others,
can scarcely be imagined, if the tale of the life of Archilochus be
true. Dishonored by the inequality of his parentage, slighted in the
matter of his marriage, discontented at home, restless and rejected
abroad, he seems to have been formed by the facts of his biography for
the creation of satire. And this is his greatest title to fame.
It is possible that the iambic metre existed before the date of
Archilochus. An old myth connects it with the festivals of Demeter.
Demeter, it is said, could not be made to laugh after her daughter's
loss, until a nymph, Iambé, by her jests and sarcasms, raised a
smile upon her lips. This legend proves that the Greeks referred the
origin of the iambic to those jokes and gibes which were common in
the feasts of Demeter, and from the licentious mirth of which the
satiric element of comedy was developed. The iambic is nearest in
cadence to the language of common life; it is, therefore, the fit
vehicle for dialogue, and for all poetry that deals with common and
domestic topics. Again, it is essentially rapid in movement: Horace
speaks of _celeres iambi_ (swift iambi); Hadrian calls them #lyssôntes
iamboi# (raging iambi): this rapidity fitted them for sharp attack
and swift satiric pungency. Admitting, then, that the metre may have
been employed in early attempts at colloquial satire, Archilochus,
perceiving its capacities, fashioned it to suit the purpose of his
own consummate art. He was celebrated among the ancients for having
perfected the metres belonging to what they called the #diplasion
genos#, as distinguished from the #ison genos#--that is to say, the
iambic and trochaic rhythms, in which either the arsis or the thesis
has twice the time of the other. In a trochee the first syllable
equals two of the same time as the second; in an iamb this order is
reversed; whereas the dactyl and the spondee, on which the hexameter
and elegiac metres are based, are feet each member of which has the
same time, the two shorts of the dactyl being equivalent to the second
long of the spondee. Archilochus, if not absolutely the inventor, was
the creator of these two metres, the iambic and trochaic, as truly as
Homer was the creator of the heroic measure. No proof of the power of
his genius can be greater than the fact that, whatever changes may
have been subsequently wrought in the iambic and trochaic metres, they
remained substantially the same as those which Archilochus employed,
whether afterwards adapted to satire, tragedy, or comedy. While
speaking of Archilochus as a technical artist, it ought to be mentioned
that he gave further proof of his originality by elaborating the
metrical systems which the Greeks called Asynartêtes, or unconnected.
These consisted of a mixture of dactylic and anapæstic with trochaic
feet. The ithyphallic, which was marked by a succession of three
trochees at the end of the line, was the most distinguished.
To translate Archilochus is almost impossible. His merit is the
perfection of style, which will admit of no transplantation. His
language is the language of common life, exquisitely chosen, and
kept within the most exact limits, with a view to the production of
a carefully studied effect. It is hopeless to render such fragments
as we possess without making them seem coarse or prosy, the poet's
supremacy having been achieved by his artistic handling of vernacular
Greek. When we compare its pithy terseness with the flowing grandeur of
the epic--a grandeur which had already become conventional in Greece,
a fluency which poetasters abused--it is easy to understand that the
racy epigrams of Archilochus, in which the subject was set forth
with exquisite point and without circumlocution, must have been an
acceptable novelty to his audience. Greek sculpture is not more pure in
outline than the following fragment,[73] which sets before our eyes the
figure of a girl embossed on marble or engraved in chalcedony:
#echousa thallon myrsinês eterpeto
rhodês te kalon anthos, hê de hoi komê
ômous kateskiaze kai metaphrena.#
Archilochus flourished between 714 and 676 B.C. The date of the next
iambic poet, Simonides of Amorgos, is 660 B.C. It is noticeable that
both of these satirists are Ionian. The relaxation of Ionian life and
the freedom of Ionian manners, as concerned the artist and the public,
rendered the development of satire in Ionia more natural than it could
ever have been in a Dorian state. Simonides owes his celebrity to
a poem upon women, a very ungallant production of 119 lines, which
presents one of the most curious examples upon record of a perfectly
smooth and yet crushing satire. The iambic lines flow quietly and
swiftly off the poet's lips, in mild and polished phraseology, with
none of the concentrated fury of Archilochus. Yet Simonides aims at
no less than destroying the character of a whole sex. In a sort of
gentle, well-mannered, lazy way he is successful, not so much by
persuading us through examples, after the method of Juvenal, that his
satire is justified, as by the imperturbable expression of a profound
conviction. The interest of this poem is very great, as marking a
departure from the personalities of Archilochus and an attempt to
introduce generalities into the region of satiric delineation. In
this respect it is in Greek literature almost unique, if we except
Sicilian, Megarian, and Attic comedy, whereof this is not the place to
speak. The rhetorical treatment of a problem of social ethics from the
point of view of satire was, as we shall see hereafter, alien to Greek
literature.
This is the plan of the poem. Simonides describes the nature of the
different sorts of women by comparing them successively to a hog, a
fox, a dog, mud, sea-water, an ass, a weasel, a mare, an ape, a bee.
Thus there are ten kinds, and only one respectable or industrious. He
rushes at once _in medias res_: "God made the mind of women in the
beginning of different qualities: for one he fashioned of a bristly
hog; in whose house everything tumbles about in disorder, bespattered
with mud, and rolls upon the ground: she, dirty, with unwashed clothes,
sits and grows fat in a dung-heap." The woman like mud is thus hit
off: "This woman is ignorant of everything both good and bad; her only
accomplishment is eating; cold though the winter be, she is too stupid
to draw near the fire." Here is the woman who takes after the sea: "She
has two minds; when she laughs and is glad, the stranger seeing her
at home will give her praise--there is not a better woman than this
on the earth, no, nor a fairer; but another day she is unbearable,
not to be looked at or approached, but she is right mad. To friend
and foe she is alike implacable and odious. Thus as the sea often is
calm and innocent, a great delight to sailors in summer-time, and
oftentimes again is frantic, tearing along with roaring billows; so
is this woman in her temper." The woman who resembles a mare offers
other disagreeable qualities. She is "delicate and long-haired, unfit
for drudgery or toil: _she_ would not touch the mill or lift the sieve
or clean the house out! She bathes twice or thrice a day, and smears
herself with myrrh; then she wears her hair combed out, long and wavy,
decked with flowers. It follows that this woman is a rare sight to
one's guests, but to her husband she's a curse, unless he be a tyrant
who prides himself on such expensive luxuries." The ape-like wife is
treated even worse. But at last we reach the bee: "The man who gets
her is lucky; to her alone belongs no blame: his property thrives
and increases under her; and loving with a loving helpmate she grows
old, the mother of a fair and famous race. Such wives are the best
and wisest Zeus grants to men." Yet even after this pretty picture
Simonides winds up with a comprehensive condemnation of the female sex:
"Zeus made this supreme evil--women: even though they seem to be of
good, when one has got one, she becomes a plague."
The spirit of this invective is derived in a great measure from
Hesiod, whose myth of Pandora marked his estimate of women, and whose
precepts concerning the choice of a wife must have depressed the
Boeotian bachelors with the certainty that nine women out of ten would
prove a curse. This is precisely the proportion of bad to good that
Simonides establishes. His tenth and virtuous wife is praised because
she is industrious and quiet, and the mother of many children. We here
get the primitive ideal of the helpmeet for man. Modern theorists
would condemn it as the model of a slave. And it is certain that, as
Greek civilization advanced, without a corresponding elevation of
the conception of wifehood, the chivalrous sentiment of the Greeks
sought other channels than that of sexual love, exalting a form of
passionate friendship between men as the real source of heroic action
and inspiring thought.[74] The outline traced by Simonides was filled
in by subsequent satirists. Susarion, the comic poet, makes this
grandiloquent proclamation: "Hear, O ye people! These are the words of
Susarion of Tripodiscus, Philinus's son, of Megara: Woman is a curse!"
Aristophanes in his plays the _Lysistrata_, the _Thesmophoriazusæ_,
and the _Ecclesiazusæ_, gives to the Athenian women all the attributes
of the hog, the ape, the clay, the sea, and the fox; in the _Clouds_
he draws the picture of one who is like the old blood-mare; but he
does not hint, even by way of parody, that there existed any bees.
The Greeks never learned the art of making women their companions
in the noblest sense. It must, however, be borne in mind that the
Ionians were less civilized in this respect than the Dorians, who
had a higher regard for the excellences of women, and allowed them
greater liberty.[75] Simonides is expressing Ionian rather than Dorian
sentiments, and at the same time may be reasonably supposed to be
overstraining them for the sake of a burlesque effect.
Next in date to Simonides among the iambographers ranks Hipponax of
Ephesus, who flourished about 540 B.C. He, too, was an Ionian. The
satire which Archilochus had directed against private enemies was
extended, as we have seen, by Simonides to a whole sex; and thus its
purely selfish character had been considerably modified. But Hipponax
restored it to its primitive function. He used the iambic as a weapon
of personal attack; and as Archilochus had shot his arrows against
Lycambes and his daughters, so Hipponax found a butt in Bupalus and
Athenis, sculptors of Chios. These two artists had begun by ridiculing
the poet, who was short and thin and ugly. They seem to have made
caricatures of him, piquing themselves, no doubt, upon the durability
of the marble in which they worked. But they found more than their
match in Hipponax, whose biting verses are said to have driven Bupalus
to hang himself. Whether this is a mere echo of the tale of Lycambes
remains doubtful; but, at any rate, the statues of the sculptor have
perished, while the poet's iambics exist in sufficient force to justify
his reputation among the ancients for having been the most caustic,
crabbed, and sour of satirists. They called him #ho pikros# (the
pungent), and in their epigrams made merry over his traditional bad
temper. Leonidas of Tarentum, for instance, warns travellers not to
touch his tomb, lest they should rouse the sleeping wasp; and Alcæus
of Messene says that no ivy, vine, or rose should adorn his grave, but
only thorns and thistles.
In order apparently to bring the metre still more within the sphere
of prose and common speech, Hipponax ended his iambics with a spondee
or a trochee instead of an iambus, doing thus the utmost violence to
the rhythmical structure. These deformed and mutilated verses were
called #chôliamboi# or #iamboi skazontes# (lame or limping iambics).
They communicate a curious crustiness to the style. The choliambi are
in poetry what the dwarf or cripple is in human nature. Here again,
by their acceptance of this halting metre, the Greeks displayed their
acute æsthetic sense of propriety, recognizing the harmony which
subsists between crabbed verses and the distorted subjects with which
they dealt--the vices and perversions of humanity--as well as their
agreement with the snarling spirit of the satirist. Deformed verse
was suited to deformed morality. Meanwhile it is but just to Hipponax
to record that he appears to have been a sincere castigator of crime,
extravagance, and folly. Without the sublime perfection and fervid
energy of Archilochus, he does not seem to have shared the unamiable
personal qualities of the greater poet. Two of his lines give a
sufficient notion of his style:
#dy' hêmerai gynaikos eisin hêdistai,
hotan gamêi tis kakpherêi tethnêkuian.#
A woman gives two days of happiness to man, in her bridal and her
burial.
The satire which these three Ionians, Archilochus, Simonides, and
Hipponax, inaugurated in Greece was continued by the Attic comic poets.
Satire in the Roman and the modern sense of the term never flourished
among the Greeks. The life of the Agora, the Ecclesia, and the Theatre
was too complete and free to need the supplement of rhetorical
invective intended either for reading or for recitation. Of satirical
comments upon individuals and of pasquinades of every kind the Greeks
had plenty. We hear, for example, that Alcæus exercised his poetical
talent in satirizing Pittacus, and one of the most considerable
fragments of Anacreon contains a very ludicrous caricature of Artemon,
his rival for the affections of a certain yellow-haired Eurypyle. But
their satire did not incline to the form which the earlier writers of
iambics had invented. It found its true sphere in the Dorian comedy
of Epicharmus and the Athenian comedy of Aristophanes, who combined
the personalities of Archilochus and the generalities of Simonides in
his own consummate work of dramatic art. Among the lost treasures of
Greek literature we have to regret few things more than the plays of
the Syracusan Epicharmus, from whom we might have learned directly
what now we can only infer--that the Dorians, when uncontrolled by the
severe taste of Sparta, indulged a humor for drollery and sarcasm,
which, though rougher than that of the Ionians, must have had its own
flavor of raciness and fun. Roman satire maintained a strictly moral
intention; _facit indignatio versus_ is the motto of Juvenal, while
Horace holds the mirror of worldly philosophy to the follies and the
vices of his age, and Persius applies the canons of Stoical ethics to
the phenomena of society as he observed them. This is the lead which
our modern satirists--the Regnier of France, the Dryden or the Pope
of England, have followed. Greek literature furnishes no specimen of
this species of composition. Wherever in the Comedies of Aristophanes,
or the Dialogues of Lucian, or the Epigrams of the Anthology, we meet
with satire, we find the simple motives of Archilochus and Simonides
at work. Personal animosity gives a barb and a venom to the shaft;
or the poet delineates with more or less of comic wit the social
anomalies that have struck his fancy. Of serious invective and of moral
preaching, the Greeks, in their satiric art at least, knew nothing.
Plato himself is only accidentally a satirist in the sense of the term
which we moderns have adopted from the Romans.
FOOTNOTES:
[65] _On the Sublime_, xxxiii. 5.
[66] _Rep._, 365, c.
[67] _Anth. Pal._, vii. 674.
[68] _Philostr. Bioi Soph._, 620.
[69] x. 1. 60.
[70] It was rage that armed Archilochus with his own iambic.
[71] Bergk, _Poetæ Lyrici_, p. 696.
[72] _Ib._ p. 689.
[73] Bergk, p. 691:
Holding a myrtle-rod she blithely moved,
And a fair blossoming rose; the flowing hair
Shadowed her shoulders, falling to her girdle.
[74] The degradation of women was undoubtedly the source of many of
the worst faults of the Greek race. Yet it is easy to overestimate the
importance of such satires as that of Simonides; nor would it be fair
to take them as expressing the deliberate opinion of the nation. The
Jews, who gave a nobler place in social life to women, ascribed the
fall of man to Eve. Modern literature again, in spite of Christianity
and chivalry, is not wanting in epigrams like the following, ascribed
to Leo Battista Alberti: "Levity and inconstancy were given to women as
a counterbalance to their perfidy and badness; for, could woman stick
to her purpose, she would destroy all the fair works of man."
[75] Plutarch's _Life of Cleomenes_ contains two historical pictures of
heroic wifehood.