Archilochus: First Poet after Homer

Αρχιλόχου τα Αποσπάσματα (κείμενο στο πρωτότυπο, ανάλυση στην Αγγλική)
William Harris, Prof. Emeritus Classics, Middlebury College
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter I: The Poet and Poetry
Chapter II: Warfare and the Poet
Chapter III: Places and Persons
Chapter IV: Love and Sex
Chapter V: Wine and Festivity

Archilochus was known in ancient Greece, to everyone who knew anythingabout literature, as the first poet after Homer and Hesiod. To an educated Greek in the Fourth Century A.D. it would have seemed inexplicable to have to explain in a preface to the poems of Archilochus, who this famous poet was, when and where he lived and what kind of verse he wrote. Although no more precise about exact dates than we are, he would have placed Homer about four hundred years after the Trojan War, Hesiod somewhat later, and Archilochus in the time of Gyges, about or after 480 B.C., as we know from the Parian Marble. Archilochus’ volumes were currently available to him, and he would hardly have thought that this author and Hipponax and Sappho, let alone a hundred others, would have virtually disappeared in the next seven hundred years. But the course of centuries has changed all that, we have only a residual fraction of Hellenic literature, and in the case of the early poets other than the Epic writers we have mere table scraps from later writers, shredded papyri in pieces at best, and hardly enough from which to write a decent literary preface.

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