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Updated: June 16, 2025
Horace's part in the battle of Philippi had long since become to him a laughable episode of youth. He had even made a merry verse about it, casting the unashamed story of his flight in the words of Archilochus and Alcaeus, as if the chief result for him had been a bit of literary experiment.
'Much learning makes not wise' was the motto of his work; the man of gift, of insight, that man is better than ten thousand. He was savage in his criticism of other writers, even the greatest. Homer, he said, and Archilochus too, deserved to be hooted from the platform and thrashed. Even the main purport of his writings was differently interpreted.
Each verse he wrote was polished, and pointed like an arrow-head. Thenceforth Archilochus led a wandering life, full of vicissitudes, but replete with evidences of his merit.
Whether the poets have corrupted the Stoics, or the Stoics given authority to the poets, I cannot easily determine. Both alike are to be condemned. If those persons whose names have been branded in the satires of Hipponax or Archilochus were driven to despair, it did not proceed from the Gods, but had its origin in their own minds.
Besides ridiculing the vices and absurdities of individuals or of society, it had a serious practical purpose, viz. the improvement of public culture or morals. Thus it followed the old Comedy of Athens in its plain speaking, and the method of Archilochus in its bitter hostility to those who provoked attack.
The little Medeus has raised this tomb by the wayside to the memory of his Thracian nurse, and has added the inscription The woman will have this recompense for all her careful nurture of the boy, and why? because she was serviceable even to the end. XIX The statue of Archilochus.
There needed no licensing of books among them, for they disliked all but their own laconic apophthegms, and took a slight occasion to chase Archilochus out of their city, perhaps for composing in a higher strain than their own soldierly ballads and roundels could reach to.
Nor so much did pleasant Lesbos mourn for Alcaeus, nor did the Teian town so greatly bewail her poet, while for thee more than for Archilochus doth Paros yearn, and not for Sappho, but still for thee doth Mytilene wail her musical lament;
As early as between 708 and 665 B. C., Archilochus brought to perfection a poetry worthy of loftier passions than those which mostly animated his headstrong and angry genius. Perhaps, of all that Greece has bequeathed to us, nothing is so perfect in its concentration of real feeling as the fragments of Sappho.
Among the Greeks, I will name but two for Iambics, ARCHILOCHUS Parius and HIPPONAX Ephesius: so amongst us, I name but two Iambical poets; GABRIEL HARVEY and RICHARD STANYHURST, because I have seen no more in this kind.
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