ARCHILOCHUS, Greek lyric poet and writer of lampoons, was born at Paros, one of the Cyclades islands. The date of his birth is uncertain, but he probably flourished about 65o B.C. ; ac cording to some, about forty years earlier but certainly not be fore the reign of Gyges (687-652), which he mentions in a well known fragment. His father, Telesicles, who was of noble family, had conducted a colony to Thasos, whither Archilochus afterwards removed, hard pressed by poverty, and indignant because Ly cambes refused him his daughter in marriage. At Thasos the poet passed some unhappy years ; his hopes of wealth were disap pointed ; according to him, Thasos was the meeting-place of the calamities of all Hellas. The inhabitants were frequently in volved in quarrels with their neighbours, and in a war against the Saians—a Thracian tribe—he threw away his shield and fled. Af ter leaving Thasos, he is said to have visited Sparta, but to have been at once banished from that city on account of his cowardice and the licentious character of his works (Valerius Maximus vi. 3, externa 1). He next visited Siris, in lower Italy. He then returned to his native place, and was slain in a battle against the Naxians by one Calondas or Corax, who was cursed by the oracle for having slain a servant of the Muses.
The writings of Archilochus consisted of elegies, hymns—one of which used to be sung by the victors in the Olympic games (Pindar, Olympia, ix. I.)—and of poems in the iambic and tro chaic measures. To him certainly we owe the invention of iambic poetry and its application to the purposes of satire. The only previous measures in Greek poetry had been the epic hexameter, and its offshoot the elegiac metre; but the slow measured struc ture of hexameter verse was utterly unsuited to express the quick, light motions of satire. Archilochus made use of the iambus and the trochee, and organized them into the two forms of metre known as the iambic trimeter and the trochaic tetrameter. The trochaic metre he generally used for subjects of a serious nature, the iambic for satires. He was also the first to make use of the arrangement of verses called the epode. Horace in his metres to a great extent follows Archilochus (Epistles, i. i9. 23-25). All ancient authorities unite in praising the poems of Archilochus. (Longinus xiii. 3 ; Dio Chrysostom, Orationes, xxxiii. ; Quintilian x. i. 6o; Cicero, Orator, i.). Horace (Ars Poetica, 79) speaks of the "rage" of Archilochus, and Hadrian calls his verses "raging iambics." His poems were'written in the old Ionic dialect. Fragments in Bergk, Poetae Lyrici Graeci; Liebel, Archilochi Reliquiae (1818) ; A. Hauvet te-Besnault, Archiloque, sa vie et ses poesies (1905).