The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis
by: Jeffrey Carson
Archilochos, Our Great Poet
by Jeffrey Carson, October 2004
Archilochos, Paros's great poet, lived toward the middle of the seventh century BCE, that is, in the very early Archaic Age, when writing went back hardly more than a generation, when inter-island travelling was dangerous, when Greece was culturally and materially no match for Asia Minor and Egypt, and when life was lived closer to the edge. He still seems contemporary, but we must be circumspect.
In ancient times Archilochos was considered to be second only to Homer, who preceded him, probably, by less than a century; Sappho comes half a century later. All that survives of his poetry is fragments - quotations by later grammarians, semi-decipherable papyrus scraps from Egyptian scrap heaps, a remembered line. But the bits are enormously impressive nonetheless. He is the first poet we have who seems to speak to us of his own emotions. His poem-fragments show a sensibility lyrical, personal, satirical, vindictive, songful, erotic, scurrilous, irreverent and pious. Anger, desire, sorrow, and the alternation of these were never before so directly turned into poetry.
According to much later biographical traditions, Archilochos' father was a Parian nobleman and his mother a slave girl. He was a soldier, perhaps a mercenary. His most famous poem (which was banned in war-mad Sparta) is about losing his shield, traditionally a disgrace, since abandoning one's shield suggests fast inglorious flight:
Some Saian flaunts my blameless shield I left
unwillingly behind a bush; the hell with it,
I got away, so what's that shield to me?
I'll get another just as good.
Archilochos' father or grandfather established the Parian colony on Thasos, in the northern Aegean, and he spent part of his life there. He described Thasos like this:
this island stands
like an ass's backbone wreathed with wildwood.
He seems to have been formally engaged to a girl named Neoboule, who broke it - a great humiliation. He violently mocked her and her father in scathing verse; later versions of this story say they hanged themselves. He was killed in a fight with a man from Naxos named, suspiciously, Korax (Crow), who angered Apollo.
To the Hellenistic Greeks, who had almost as little context as we do for interpretation, his ferocious mockery was his prime characteristic, and he is credited with developing iambic verse for precisely this purpose. A later poet wrote, "He developed the iamb/So to say I am." But he can also be tender:
Holding myrtle sprig and pretty
rosebush flower she rejoiced;
her hair
shadowed her shoulders and her lower back.
Unlike today, poets in ancient Greece were public and popular, and Archilochos wrote war songs, religious songs, mourning songs, political songs, and fables:
The fox knows many things, the hedgehog one big thing.
The fragments from the hero?n (hero's sanctuary) that the Parians built to him in the fourth century BCE are now in the Archaeological Museum, and the cave where he reputedly sought information is full of bats. But we on Paros still tread his soil, eat his figs, sail his seas, and hope his acerbic, tuneful Muse is still about.
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