male friend of his passion for Neobule's younger sister and how he seduced her in a flowery meadow. His
'reported' words criticize Neobule savagely:
Let me tell you this. Neobule
let another man have:
ah! she's gone off - she's twice your age
and all her young girl's bloom has flowed away
and the charm she once had.(fr. 196A. 24-8)
But her sister's conquest is narrated tenderly and without coarseness:
These were my words: and 'mid the blooming flowers
I embraced the young girl
and laid her down, and with a soft
cloak covered her, her head clasped in my arms.
a-trembling with fear
just like a fawn [ ]
and gently stroked my hands across her b[ ]s.(ibid. 42-8: square brackets mark gaps)
The poem extends Archilochus' known range of themes and tones. The scanty fragments of his near-
contemporaries, Tyrtaeus, Callinus, and Mimnermus, who also composed poetry for the symposion,
hardly suggest similar versatility, but their range may be inadequately reflected in what survives. Our only
substantial elegy of Callinus of Ephesus exhorts young men to fight for their country; so too Tyrtaeus'
elegies for Sparta, sung (according to fourth-century sources) at banquets during campaigns. Mimnermus
of Colophon also sang martial exhortations (fr. 14), but it was songs on love, youth, and age that
immortalized him. Tyrtaeus urged a warrior to
hold his shield fast
making his own life his enemy, and the black spirits
of Death as dear to him as the rays of the sun.(fr. 11. 6-8)
Mimnermus turned this image to praise of youth and abhorrence of age:
But we, like the blooms that blossom in the season of many flowers,
Spring, when they suddenly shoot, caught by the sun's bright rays -
like these, for a cubit's length of time the flowers of youth