to a variety of types, all of which (with one exception) are vile. This is the same attitude toward women
that we have seen in Hesiod. Semonides shares with Hesiod also a fondness for using the language of
generation as a metaphor for the process of development. For Zeus created women, according to
Semonides, “from” a variety of different animals, and these animals (the slovenly sow, the devious vixen,
the wanton bitch, and so on) are spoken of as the “parents” of the various types. So, for example,
One type is sprung from a long-maned, high-strung mare.
She finds chores a bore and scorns hard work:
She won’t touch a handmill, won’t lift a sieve,
won’t cart the dung outside ...The only type of woman that a man is lucky to get for his wife – and it is clear that Semonides is
addressing a male audience – is the type “descended” from the industrious bee. Like Hesiod, Semonides
considers women only in their domestic capacity and, like Hesiod, he is convinced that they are merely a
drain on the resources of the household. But his tone is much more down to earth and his language less
elevated than the formal and formulaic “epic” diction of Hesiod.
It is characteristic of iambic verse that it is the poetic form most like everyday conversation, both in its
manner of expression and its subject matter, and we have seen that both Archilochus and Semonides deal
with ordinary human emotions and are not above making comparisons with commonplace members of the
animal kingdom. (Homer, by contrast, often compares his characters with the more “heroic” lion.) These
two iambic poets have other things in common as well. They were both born on Aegean islands in that
area of Greece that is home to speakers of the Ionic dialect, Archilochus on Paros and Semonides on
Samos (map 8), but both of them left their place of birth and migrated to yet other Aegean islands as
settlers sent out by their native poleis. Further, both of them write in a vivid manner about the uncertainty
of human existence. This may result in each instance from personal experience of their own uprootedness.
It may equally well derive from the standard persona of the iambic poet, whose satiric character requires
that the poet pose as an outsider in order to distance himself from the objects of his invective. The use of
masculine pronouns in referring to iambic poets has been deliberate, because such poetry seems not to
have been composed by women, perhaps because it was felt to be unseemly, or because the role of
outsider could not be convincingly performed by a woman, who was not free to travel on her own from
polis to polis.