Hipponax, Semonides and the iambographers

This page gathers the iambic poets after Archilochus whom the metrical sources treat together, with Solon’s iambics. Solon’s life is on the Elegists page. Archilochus, Semonides and Hipponax are the three great archaic iambic poets.^[1]

Semonides of Amorgos

Of Semonides’ life nothing can be said with certainty beyond his connection with the island of Amorgos.^[2] Tradition says that he led a group of Samian colonists to Amorgos, which makes him a man of rank. It says that he performed trimeters, tetrameters and elegies at symposia. He did not use epodes. A “History of the Samians”, probably a narrative elegy, is lost.^[3] He is one of the early Ionian iambic poets who used the trimeter, with Archilochus.^[4]

Date (disputed). Carey dates him “probably” to the first half of the seventh century, following Brown.^[2] Lennartz, citing Proclus’ Chrestomathy, calls him “somewhat younger” than Archilochus, who belongs to the middle of the century.^[5] Bowie places him, with Archilochus, Callinus and Mimnermus, in the mid-seventh century.^[6] The Cambridge chronology gives “7th cent.”.^[7]

Hipponax of Ephesus

Hipponax, son of Pytheus and Protis, was born in Ephesus.^[8] The biographical tradition says he was banished from Ephesus to Klazomenai. Lennartz thinks the detail too specific to be invented. Carey notes only that the later tradition maintains he was exiled, and that nothing political survives in the poems.^[9]

Date (the ranges differ). Lennartz puts his activity between about 520 and 490 BC.^[8] Carey treats a sixth-century date as secure.^[10] The Cambridge chronology gives “mid- or late 6th cent.”.^[7]

The persona. A persona is the character a poet speaks as. The speaker “Hipponax” names himself repeatedly. He and his companions are drawn as poor outcasts.^[11] Carey finds strong hints that the speaker is a thief, with Hermes, god of thieves, prominent. Lennartz calls Hermes his favourite god. But he denies that “Hipponax” is depicted as a thief, since Hellenistic poets saw him as a man of stern judgement.^[12] Both Lennartz and Carey think the author was an educated member of the elite, and the persona a mask. They explain it differently.^[13]

His language mixes Ionic with Lydian words.^[14] His chief enemy is Bupalus, a sculptor of Chios who worked with his brother Athenis.^[15] Carey takes Bupalus to be historical. He notes Rosen’s suggestion that the poet chose a real name for its obscene etymological potential.^[16]

Where he performed (disputed). One may imagine the symposium. But Carey finds it unusual for an aristocratic audience to be so interested in the lower orders. West suggested a festival, perhaps the Thargelia. The scapegoat (pharmakos) ritual of several poems was associated with that festival.^[17] West also observed that the metrical difference between Hipponax and his predecessors fits a different performance context. Carey reports this, and concludes that none of it can be proven.^[18]

Ananius

Hephaestion already records the doubt over the lame trimeter, “which some say was the invention of Hipponax, others of Ananius”.^[19] Ananius is a further archaic iambographer about whom little is known.^[20] Lennartz treats Hipponax as the inventor, and Ananius as a contemporary who imitated him at once.^[21] The question is open.

Solon’s iambics

Like Archilochus, Solon was known for both elegies and iamboi. But his surviving iamboi use only the iambic trimeter and the trochaic tetrameter catalectic. He used them for political self-justification, not for abuse or erotic narrative.^[6] They are discussed on the next tab.

Semonides. His longest fragment, fr. 7, derives types of women from animals (sow, vixen, bitch, ass, weasel, mare, monkey, bee) and from earth and sea. Only the woman born of the bee is commended.^[1] Carey sees in it the aggression and shared values of Archilochus’ attacks on Lycambes, widened from individual targets to the whole female sex. He finds it hard to dismiss as mere entertainment. Lennartz likewise rejects “folksy”, comic or carnival readings. He reads in it the anxieties of a closed male group.^[2]

Fr. 1 begins “My boy, loud-thundering Zeus holds the outcome of all things” (our translation). It reflects on the futility of human hopes. Carey finds its closest parallel in Solon’s elegiac Prayer to the Muses (fr. 13).^[3] Other fragments show first-person narratives of eating, drinking and sex, obscene rebuke and animal fable.^[4] Most of his trimeters and all his trochaic poems are lost.^[5]

Hipponax. In fr. 32 the speaker prays to Hermes, in hymnic form, for a cloak, a little tunic, sandals and boots, and sixty gold staters.^[6] Epic is constantly parodied, above all the Odyssey. The woman in “Hipponax’s” life is called Arete, like the Phaeacian queen. Cypso recalls Calypso. Rosen has compared the boxing match with Bupalus in frr. 120–121 with Odysseus’ fight with Irus.^[7] Carey reads the parody as a claim to be “the Homer of his trade”.^[8] Several poems cast Bupalus as a scapegoat (pharmakos), to be driven out of the city.^[9]

Hipponax also wrote short, elegant love songs in a dancing rhythm. One is fr. 119, “If only I might have a maiden, fair and tender” (our translation).^[10] It is in the iambic tetrameter catalectic, which Hephaestion quotes as his specimen of the metre.^[11] This is the “cheerful metre” of West 1987, p. 29:

The curse poem, fr. 115 (attribution disputed). A papyrus at Strasbourg has eight epodic stanzas. An epode, in this sense, is a couplet of a longer and a shorter line, repeated. The stanzas curse a former companion who broke his oath. May he be driven by the waves to Salmydessus, naked, and taken by the Thracians, to eat the bread of slavery.^[12]

Neither the victim’s nor the poet’s name is in the text. Lennartz stresses that there is no positive documentation that the poem is by Hipponax. But the same papyrus contains an epode, fr. 117, that he regards as certainly Hipponax’s. And most experts, West and Degani among them, assign fr. 115 to him.^[13] Carey marks fr. 117 as of dubious authenticity. Yet he treats fr. 115 as Hipponax’s, and as evidence of a distinct, aristocratic strand in his work, most likely performed at the symposium.^[14]

Solon’s iambics. His longest fragment is fr. 36, twenty-eight iambic trimeters transmitted entire by the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians. In it he claims that he removed the boundary-markers that enslaved the land of Attica, and brought home citizens sold abroad. He calls dark Earth to witness.^[15]

The tetrameters frr. 32–34 defend his conduct and attack his critics. In fr. 33 they mock him as foolish for refusing the tyranny.^[16] Their content places them after his archonship, traditionally 594/3 BC.^[16] Bowie thinks they may have been sung first at symposia of like-minded friends. He does not rule out performance at some formal political meeting. Elsewhere he argues for a more formal context for the tetrameters than for the trimeters.^[17]

The metres are set out on the Metres tabs.

Indirect tradition. Greek lyric apart from Pindar and the Theognidea was until recently known only through quotation. It was quoted by authors such as Athenaeus and Stobaeus, and in the scholia, the ancient notes on texts.^[1] That holds for the iambographers too. For Hipponax the metrical handbook of Hephaestion, the Enchiridion, is a principal witness. It quotes him only where he is useful as a specimen: one iambic tetrameter catalectic (fr. 119 W),^[2] one choliamb with a spondee in the fifth foot (5.4), one lame trochaic tetrameter (6.2), and one nine-syllable line that gave its name to the “hipponactean” (10.2):

Hephaestion calls the colon “the so-called Sapphic nine-syllable or hipponactean”. He analyses it as an antispastic dimeter hypercatalectic.^[3] In West’s notation it is a hipponactean, × × — ⏑ ⏑ — ⏑ — —: a glyconic with one syllable added.^[4] Rhinthon’s Orestes has the phrase Ἱππώνακτος τὸ μέτρον (Hippōnaktos to metron), “Hipponax’s metre”.^[5] So the poet’s name was already shorthand for the metre. No line of Semonides or Solon is quoted in the Enchiridion. Lucian names Semonides’ chief target, Orodokides, in a form Lennartz thinks corrupt.^[6]

Papyri. Hipponax 115 comes from the “Strasburg Papyrus”. In it hemiepes and iambic trimeter alternate.^[7] The papyrus is P. Strasb. 3, and its attribution to Hipponax is not documented.^[8] A papyrus title was once read as “Odysseus” (P.Oxy. 2174 fr. 5 = fr. 74). It suggested an “iambic epic”. Carey accepts, with some caution, that fr. 74 bears the title Odysseus. Lennartz reports that Prodi has doubted it with good reason.^[9] West quotes choliambic trimeters from fr. 79.17–20 and tetrameters from frr. 120–121 (both with scansion under Metres).^[10]

Numbering and editions. The standard edition of the iambic and elegiac poets is West’s Iambi et elegi Graeci (2nd edn, 1989–92). Gerber’s Loeb of 1999 gives text and translation.^[11] For Hipponax there is also Degani’s edition, which Lennartz calls magisterial. For Semonides there is the commentary of Pellizer and Tedeschi.^[12]

The two Hipponax numerations differ. Hipponax 28.6 West is 39.6 Degani.^[13] Fragment numbers on this page are West’s, as in Lennartz and Carey. Kiparsky’s “Hipponax 19” and “115” carry page references to Gerber’s Loeb.^[14] The numbers in the digitised Consbruch text of Hephaestion belong to an older edition (Bergk’s Poetae Lyrici Graeci, PLG⁴), and differ again.

The Hellenistic revival. The choliamb came back into use in the late fourth century BC, now tied to Hipponax in particular. It was used in Callimachus’ Iambi 1–4 and 13 and in Herondas.^[15] Babrius used it for his fables in the first century AD.^[16] Hipponax, not Archilochus, became the figurehead. Hellenistic poets were drawn to his wording and metre, while the plain trimeter was by then ready-made.^[17]

Phoenix of Colophon wrote ethical sermons and short aetiological poems in limping lines. Herodas wrote “iambic mimes”. In the “Dream” (Herod. 8) he presents himself as Hipponax’s true heir. Callimachus’ book of thirteen Iamboi is poorly preserved, but known through the ancient summaries (Diegeseis). It opens by bringing Hipponax back from Hades to speak.^[18]

Hephaestion’s model choliamb is ἀκούσαθ’ Ἱππώνακτος· οὐ γὰρ ἀλλ’ ἥκω.^[19] It is the opening line of that poem, which Lennartz quotes as Call. fr. 191.1–4 Pf.:^[20] “Hear Hipponax! Yes, truly, I have come …” (our translation). Hellenistic epigrams (Theocritus, Leonidas) remember Hipponax as a stern judge who spared no one.^[21] The metrical differences between the model and the imitators are on the Metres tab.

The choliamb. Hipponax and Ananius write odd forms of the iambic trimeter and the trochaic tetrameter. They are known as choliambic (from χωλός, chōlos, ‘lame’) or scazon (‘limping’). In nearly every line, though not in all, a long stands where the short penultimate should be. The rhythm jolts, as if it had gone wrong.^[1]

West gives no separate schemes. Applying his description to the trimeter and tetrameter^[2] gives these:

West’s examples,^[3] with Greek independently checked against Bergk. Hipponax 79.17–20, trimeters (the first of them, he notes, an ordinary iambic trimeter):

West underlines the long penultimates -λευ-, -λον-, στοι-. In 79.20 his syllable-mark πυθˈμένι shows θμ divided, so that πυθ- is long.

Hipponax 120–121, tetrameters:

The contracted pronoun μου is one long syllable; θαἰμάτια joins the article and noun by crasis. The first line has two resolutions (λάβε-, -μάτι-). -θαλ- and κόπ- are the “wrong” long penultimates.

Resolution is admitted, and occasionally an anapaestic foot in a trimeter.^[3] The fourth position from the end is normally short. When it is long, the verse is called ischiorrhogic, “broken-hipped”. An example is Hippon. 9.1:^[3]

Hephaestion says the same thing in terms of feet. The lame line differs from the straight one in having a spondee or trochee for its last iamb. It refuses trisyllabic feet in the fifth place. There it takes “mostly an iamb, when it is also seemly”, but “sometimes also a spondee, when it becomes rougher”.^[5] His two examples:

Kiparsky’s example, Hipponax 19, is regular on both counts:^[6]

Syncopation is the suppression of a short element, so that two longs meet. The choliamb is the one Greek case of syncopation in the last foot rather than the first. Its harsh refusal of a smooth close suits the genre.^[6]

A hymn that does not limp. In fr. 32 the speaker prays to Hermes for warm clothes and gold. The rhythm is handled with strict care. The “limping” effect is ironically omitted in the hymn-like first line:^[7]

Line 1 ends ⏑ ×, a normal trimeter. Line 2 limps, since the ι of ῥιγῶ is long.^[8]

Prosody. Synecphonesis is the running together of vowels across a word-boundary into one syllable. Between words it is allowed chiefly in Sappho, in Hipponax and his Alexandrian followers, and in Old Comedy.^[9] Correption is the shortening of a long vowel or diphthong before another vowel. Hipponax has correption inside the word in δείλαιος (deilaios), “wretched”, λεύειν (leuein), “to stone”, and εὔωνον (euōnon), “cheap”:^[10] a diphthong or long vowel stands in a short position before the next vowel of the same word. He scans ὄφις (ophis), “snake”, with the first syllable long, as if ὄπφις (opphis), like the notorious Homeric line Il. 12.208.^[11]

Later practice, for contrast. The revived choliamb drops the pure iambic ending, with one doubtful exception in Phoenix of Colophon. Herondas has the ischiorrhogic ending about once in 24 lines, and Callimachus avoids it. Babrius always accents the penultimate syllable. So Hipponax’s πάλαι γὰρ αὐτούς line breaks Babrius’ rules in four ways.^[12]

Besides the choliamb,^[1] Hipponax used a lame form of the trochaic tetrameter, and the iambic tetrameter catalectic. Semonides and Solon wrote ordinary trimeters, and Solon wrote trochaic tetrameters.

The lame tetrameter. Hephaestion’s example, Hippon. ap. Ench. 6.2:

The penultimate -ζεσ- is long where a trochaic tetrameter requires a short;^[2] με is lengthened before χρ-.

The iambic tetrameter catalectic. Its scheme is × — ⏑ — × — ⏑ — ¦ × ¦ — ⏑ — ⏑ — — ‖. The caesura comes at the end of the second metron, or one position later. A catalectic metron lacks its final element. In this last, catalectic metron the first position is short rather than anceps, as it is in catalectic iambic lines generally.^[3] Hephaestion’s specimen of the tetrameter is from Hipponax.^[4] It is fr. 119 W, one of Hipponax’s love songs set to a dancing rhythm:^[5]

Semonides’ trimeters. Semonides wrote trimeters and tetrameters but no epodes. All his trochaic poems are lost.^[6] What West says of the trimeter is general to “early iambus”. The trimeter is × — ⏑ — × ¦ — ⏑ ¦ — × — ⏑ — ‖. It usually has the caesura after the fifth position or, failing that, after the seventh. Porson’s Law is observed. Resolution, two shorts in place of a long, is used sparingly: on average in no more than one line out of ten.^[7]

Anapaestic feet are a licence of drama (Hipponax occasionally has one).^[8] Hephaestion says the iambic poets use the anapaest in the even feet more rarely than the comic poets.^[9] Semonides shares with Archilochus the avoidance of a short syllable before stop + liquid, even at the start of a word.^[10] The opening of his fr. 1, also discussed by Carey,^[11] is a regular trimeter with the penthemimeral caesura and no resolution:

Solon’s iambics. Solon used the trimeter and the trochaic tetrameter.^[12] In the tetrameter the early poets observe Porson’s Law at the end of the line and Havet’s Law at its beginning. Havet’s Law forbids — ⏑ — — ¦ in the first metron.^[13] The sources make one specific point about Solon’s prosody. He, with Theognis and Pindar, allows himself more freedom than the Ionian iambographers in scanning a short vowel short before stop + liquid.^[14] His longest fragment, fr. 36, is in trimeters.^[15] Line 3 again has the caesura after the fifth position:

The final η of συμμαρτυροίη is long. In ταῦτ’ ἂν ἐν the ν of ἂν goes with the following vowel, so ἂν gives a short open syllable (seventh position), and ἐν is long before δ-.