Gilbert Murray - A History of Ancient Greek Literature

Lower all round than Archilochus is HIPPÔNAX of Ephesus. Tradition makes him a beggar, lame and deformed himself, and inventor of the 'halting iambic' or 'scazon,' a deformed trimeter which upsets all one's expectations by having a spondee or trochee in the last foot. His works were all abusive. He inveighed especially against the artists Bupalos and Athênis, who had caricatured him; and of course against women -e.g., "A woman gives a man two days of pleasure: the day he marries her, and the day he carries out her corpse." Early satire does not imply much wit; it implies hard hitting, with words instead of sticks and stones. The other satirical writers of classical times, Ananius and Hermippus, Kerkidas and Aischrion, were apparently not much admired in Alexandria.

One form of satire, the Beast Fable, was especially developed in collections of stories which went under the name of ÆSOP. He seems to be a mere storyfigure, like Kerkôps or Kreophŷlus, invented to provide an author for the fables. He was a foreign slave -- Thracian, Phrygian, or Ethiopian -- under the same master as Rhodôpis, the courtesan who ruined Sappho's brother. He was suitably deformed; he was murdered at Delphi. Delphi dealt much in the deaths or tombs of celebrities. It used the graves of Neoptolemus and Hesiod to attract the sight-seer; it extorted monetary atonement from the slaver of Apollo's inspired servant Archilochus. But in Æsop's case a descendant of his master Iadmon made his murder a ground for claiming money from the Delphians; so it is hard to see why they countenanced the story. Tradition gave Æsop interviews with Crœsus and the Wise Men; Aristophanes makes it a jocular reproach, not to have 'trodden well' your Æsop. He is in any case not a poet, but the legendary author of a particular type of story, which any one was at liberty to put into verse, as Socrates did, or to collect in prose, like Demetrius of Phalærum. Our oldest collections of fables are the iambics of Phaedrus and the elegiacs of Avianus in Latin, and the scazons of Babrius in Greek, all three post-Christian.

1W. M. Herakles , i. 66 seq. (2nd edition).

2Our Sillos-like fragment must be by another man, not a Samian.

3Cf. the mixture á øιλοχρηματíη Σπáρταυ óλεî.

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