songs remain.
Some poets composed in several genres. Since many composed both elegiac and iambic poetry, I treat
these genres together. They share numerous themes and stances and were probably intended for similar
occasions. They also exhibit clear differences. Elegiac poetry alternates the dactylic hexameter (used line
after line for epic) with a 'pentameter' built up from the same metrical unit, the hemiepes, giving:
Like epic, elegiac couplets were sung to an accompaniment, in elegy's case the aulos: being a wind
instrument, this must have been played by someone other than the singer. Doubtless this relatively formal
presentation and a metre accommodating to epic vocabulary invited a certain dignity of tone - neither
theme nor language descends to the depths plumbed by iambic poetry. This seems to have been recited,
not sung, and its rhythms (commonest the iambic trimeter) readily accepted everyday speech.
Occasionally poets combine dactylic and iambic rhythms in a form often (confusingly) called 'epode'.
Archilochus (c.650 B.C.) used all these metres. Traditionally he was the son, albeit bastard, of the leader
of the Parian colony to Thasos, and a high place in society is corroborated by some poems' address to
Glaucus, also distinguished in Thasos' early history. His elegies were probably sung at symposia, post-
prandial drinking parties which only wealthier male citizens are likely to have attended. Such men were
also in the front line when Thasians fought Thracians or other Greeks, and the treatment of these struggles
in some long iambic fragments suggests that Archilochus took them seriously. Serious, too, is a reflective
elegy on friends lost at sea and man's need to endure what gods dispose (fr. 13). But he also played on the
contrast between war and singing (fr. 1), and a song imitated by Alcaeus, Anacreon, and Horace shows
how conviviality encouraged suspension or mockery of normal values:
My shield delights some Thracian, for I dropped
the blameless gear, unwilling, in a wood -
but saved my skin: what is that shield to me?
Stuff it! I'll get another just as good.The pithiness and balance of this, perhaps complete, song foreshadow the elegiac metre's later use for
epigrams. Some iambic poems were much longer. Themes of fighting and shipwreck may reflect
Archilochus' own life, but in fr. 19, opening with a high-minded rejection of kingly wealth and power, the
speaker emerges as not Archilochus, but a carpenter, Charon, and in another (fr. 122) a father commenting
on his daughter's conduct. Both situations may be invented, but fr. 122 is often linked with Archilochus'
supposed affair with Neobule, inferred in antiquity from his poems: when her father Lycambes ended it
Archilochus' embittered iambics allegedly drove him and his daughters to suicide. Historical or invented,
they figure in several poems, notably a fragmentary epode where the fable of the fox and the eagle warns
Lycambes that betrayal doesn't pay. In another, discovered almost complete in 1973, Archilochus tells a