For, though stern Death assail the brave,
His virtues endless life shall claim;
His fame shall mock the invidious grave,
To times unborn a sacred name.”—Lowth.
THE SATIRE.
Archilochus of Pa’ros (728-660 B.C.) was the first great satirist, the inventor of that rapid, loosely-constructed iambic measure so admirably adapted to his withering lampoons. The son of a slave-woman, Archil’ochus was treated with indignity in his native island; so bidding adieu to “the figs and fishy life” of Paros in early youth, he sailed with a colony to Tha’sos in the northern Ægean. His new home, however, disappointed his expectations; its gold-mines yielded not the fortune he had dreamed of, and he denounced it as “the sink of all Hellenic ills.” The colonists becoming engaged in war with a neighboring people, a pitched battle proved too severe an ordeal for the poet’s courage, and dropping his shield he fled.
Perhaps it was for this cowardly action, perhaps on account of his empty purse, that when he returned to Paros, one of its fair daughters, who had been his boyhood’s love, refused him her hand. Her father, also, denied his suit; whereupon the furious poet poured forth in stinging verses such a torrent of violent invective upon the girl and her whole family, that she, her father, and her sisters, are said to have taken refuge from his scurrilous attacks in suicide.
The public odium thus excited drove Archilochus from Paros. But the brand of cowardice was upon him. The Spartans, whose mothers, pointing to the battle-field, were wont to say “Return with your shields or upon them,” disdained the man who could write,
“That shield some Saian decks, which, ’gainst my grain,
I left—fair, flawless shield—beside the wood.