Array Anacreon - The Greatest Classics of Ancient Greece

1339 i.e. things which it would be sacrilege to disturb, such as tombs.

1341The month is divided into three periods, the waxing, the mid-month, and the waning, which answer to the phases of the moon.

1342 i.e. the ant.

1343Such seems to be the meaning here, though the epithet is otherwise rendered ‘well-rounded’. Corn was threshed by means of a sleigh with two runners having three or four rollers between them, like the modern Egyptian nurag .

1601The epithet probably indicates coquettishness.

1602A proverbial saying meaning, ‘why enlarge on irrelevant topics?’

1603‘She of the noble voice’: Calliope is queen of Epic poetry.

1604Earth, in the cosmology of Hesiod, is a disk surrounded by the river Oceanus and floating upon a waste of waters. It is called the foundation of all (the qualification ‘the deathless ones...’ etc. is an interpolation), because not only trees, men, and animals, but even the hills and seas (ll. 129, 131) are supported by it.

1605Aether is the bright, untainted upper atmosphere, as distinguished from Aer, the lower atmosphere of the earth.

1606Brontes is the Thunderer; Steropes, the Lightener; and Arges, the Vivid One.

1607The myth accounts for the separation of Heaven and Earth. In Egyptian cosmology Nut (the Sky) is thrust and held apart from her brother Geb (the Earth) by their father Shu, who corresponds to the Greek Atlas.

1608Nymphs of the ash-trees, as Dryads are nymphs of the oak-trees. Cp. note on Works and Days , l. 145.

1609‘Member-loving’: the title is perhaps only a perversion of the regular PHILOMEIDES (laughter-loving).

1610Cletho (the Spinner) is she who spins the thread of man’s life; Lachesis (the Disposer of Lots) assigns to each man his destiny; Atropos (She who cannot be turned) is the ‘Fury with the abhorred shears.’

1611Many of the names which follow express various qualities or aspects of the sea: thus Galene is ‘Calm’, Cymothoe is the ‘Wave-swift’, Pherusa and Dynamene are ‘She who speeds (ships)’ and ‘She who has power’.

1612The ‘Wave-receiver’ and the ‘Wave-stiller’.

1613‘The Unerring’ or ‘Truthful’; cp. l. 235.

1614 i.e. Poseidon.

1615Goettling notes that some of these nymphs derive their names from lands over which they preside, as Europa, Asia, Doris, Ianeira (‘Lady of the Ionians’), but that most are called after some quality which their streams possessed: thus Xanthe is the ‘Brown’ or ‘Turbid’, Amphirho is the ‘Surrounding’ river, Ianthe is ‘She who delights’, and Ocyrrhoe is the ‘Swift-flowing’.

1616 i.e. Eos, the ‘Early-born’.

1617Van Lennep explains that Hecate, having no brothers to support her claim, might have been slighted.

1618The goddess of the hearth (the Roman Vesta ), and so of the house. Cp. Homeric Hymns v.22 ff.; xxxix.1 ff.

1619The variant reading ‘of his father’ (sc. Heaven) rests on inferior MS. authority and is probably an alteration due to the difficulty stated by a Scholiast: ‘How could Zeus, being not yet begotten, plot against his father?’ The phrase is, however, part of the prophecy. The whole line may well be spurious, and is rejected by Heyne, Wolf, Gaisford and Guyet.

1620Pausanias (x. 24.6) saw near the tomb of Neoptolemus ‘a stone of no great size’, which the Delphians anointed every day with oil, and which he says was supposed to be the stone given to Cronos.

1621A Scholiast explains: ‘Either because they (men) sprang from the Melian nymphs (cp. l. 187); or because, when they were born (?), they cast themselves under the ash-trees, that is, the trees.’ The reference may be to the origin of men from ash-trees: cp. Works and Days , l. 145 and note.

1622 sc . Atlas, the Shu of Egyptian mythology: cp. note on line 177.

1623Oceanus is here regarded as a continuous stream enclosing the earth and the seas, and so as flowing back upon himself.

1624The conception of Oceanus is here different: he has nine streams which encircle the earth and then flow out into the ‘main’ which appears to be the waste of waters on which, according to early Greek and Hebrew cosmology, the disk-like earth floated.

1625 i.e. the threshold is of ‘native’ metal, and not artificial.

1626According to Homer Typhoeus was overwhelmed by Zeus amongst the Arimi in Cilicia. Pindar represents him as buried under Aetna, and Tzetzes reads Aetna in this passage.

1627The epithet (which means literally well-bored ) seems to refer to the spout of the crucible.

1628The fire god. There is no reference to volcanic action: iron was smelted on Mount Ida; cp. Epigrams of Homer , ix. 2-4.

1629 i.e. Athena, who was born ‘on the banks of the river Trito’ (cp. l. 929l)

1630Restored by Peppmuller. The nineteen following lines from another recension of lines 889-900, 924-9 are quoted by Chrysippus (in Galen).

1631 sc . the aegis. Line 929s is probably spurious, since it disagrees with l. 929q and contains a suspicious reference to Athens.

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The Life and Work of Archilochus

To His Soul

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ARCHILOCHUS of Paros (fl. 650 B.C.?) eclipsed all earlier writers of the iambus, and counts in tradition as the first. He was the 'Homer' of familiar personal poetry. This was partly due to a literary war in Alexandria, and partly to his having no rivals at his side. Still, even our scanty fragments justify Quintilian's criticism: "The sentences" really are "strong, terse, and quivering, full of blood and muscle; some people feel that if his work is ever inferior to the very highest, it must be the fault of his subject, not of his genius." This has, of course, another side to it. Archilochus is one of those masterful men who hate to feel humble. He will not see the greatness of things, and likes subjects to which he can feel himself superior. Yet, apart from the satires, which are blunt bludgeon work, his smallest scraps have a certain fierce enigmatic beauty. "Oh, hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon!" is a cry to bury his friends' shipwrecked corpses. "In my spear is kneaded bread, in my spear is wine of Ismarus; and I lie upon my spear as I drink!" That is the defiant boast of the outlaw turned freebooter. "There were seven dead men trampled under foot, and we were a thousand murderers." What does that mean? One can imagine many things. The few lines about love form a comment on Sappho. The burning, colourless passion that finds its expression almost entirely in physical language may be beautiful in a soul like hers; but what a fierce, impossible thing it is with this embittered soldier of fortune, whose intense sensitiveness and prodigious intellect seem sometimes only to mark him out as more consciously wicked than his fellows! We can make out something of his life. He had to leave Paros -- one can imagine other reasons besides or before his alleged poverty -- and settled on Thasos, "a wretched island, bare and rough as a hog's back in the sea," in company with all the worst scoundrels in Greece. In a battle with the natives of the mainland he threw away his shield and ran, and made very good jokes about the incident afterwards. He was betrothed to Cleobûlê, the daughter of a respectable Parian citizen, Lycambes. Lycambes broke off the engagement; Archilochus raged blindly and indecently at father and daughter for the rest of his life. Late tradition says they hanged themselves. Archilochus could not stay in Paros; the settlement in Thasos had failed; so he was thrown on the world, sometimes supporting himself as a mercenary soldier, sometimes doubtless as a pirate, until he was killed in a battle against Naxos. "I am a servant of the lord god of war, and I know the lovely gift of the Muses." He could fight and he could make wonderful poetry. It does not appear that any further good can be said of him.