[3][4] A considerable amount of information about the life of Archilochus has come down to the modern age via his surviving work, the testimony of other authors, and inscriptions on monuments,[4] yet it all needs to be viewed with caution – the biographical tradition is generally unreliable and the fragmentary nature of the poems does not really support inferences about his personal history.

The philosopher quoted two fragments as examples of an author speaking in somebody else's voice: in one, an unnamed father commenting on a recent eclipse of the sun and, in the other, a carpenter named Charon, expressing his indifference to the wealth of Gyges, the king of Lydia.

[9] The two poems quoted by Aristotle help to date the poet's life (assuming of course that Charon and the unnamed father are speaking about events that Archilochus had experienced himself).

Thus a sanctuary to Archilochus (the Archilocheion) was established on his home island Paros sometime in the third century BC, where his admirers offered him sacrifices, as well as to gods such as Apollo, Dionysus, and the Muses.

In one, we are told that his father Telesicles once sent Archilochus to fetch a cow from the fields, but that the boy chanced to meet a group of women who soon vanished with the animal and left him a lyre in its place – they were the Muses and they had thus earmarked him as their protégé.

His grandfather (or great-grandfather), Tellis, helped establish the cult of Demeter on Thasos near the end of the eighth century BC, a mission that was famously depicted in a painting at Delphi by the Thasian Polygnotus.

Inscriptions in the Archilocheion identify Archilochus as a key figure in the Parian cult of Dionysus[13] There is no evidence to back isolated reports that his mother was a slave, named Enipo, that he left Paros to escape poverty, or that he became a mercenary soldier – the slave background is probably inferred from a misreading of his verses; archaeology indicates that life on Paros, which he associated with "figs and seafaring", was quite prosperous; and though he frequently refers to the rough life of a soldier, warfare was a function of the aristocracy in the archaic period and there is no indication that he fought for pay.

"Perhaps there is a special relevance to his times in the particular gestures he elects to make: The abandonment of grandly heroic attitudes in favour of a new unsentimental honesty, an iconoclastic and flippant tone of voice coupled with deep awareness of traditional truths.

"[30] Ancient authors and scholars often reacted to his poetry and to the biographical tradition angrily, condemning "fault-finding Archilochus" for "fattening himself on harsh words of hatred" (see Pindar's comment below) and for "the unseemly and lewd utterances directed towards women", whereby he made "a spectacle of himself"[31] He was considered "a noble poet in other respects if one were to take away his foul mouth and slanderous speech and wash them away like a stain" (Suda).

[30] His merits as a poet were neatly summarized by the rhetorician Quintilian: "We find in him the greatest force of expression, sententious statements that are not only vigorous but also terse and vibrant, and a great abundance of vitality and energy, to the extent that in the view of some his inferiority to anyone results from a defect of subject matter rather than poetic genius.

"[37]Most ancient commentators focused on his lampoons and on the virulence of his invective,[38] yet the extant verses (most of which come from Egyptian papyri[39]) indicate a very wide range of poetic interests.

[41] The Alexandrian scholars included Archilochus in their canonical list of iambic poets, along with Semonides and Hipponax,[42] yet ancient commentators also numbered him with Tyrtaeus and Callinus as the possible inventor of the elegy.

However, they include one of the most famous of all lyric utterances, a hymn to Heracles with which victors were hailed at the Olympic Games, with a resounding refrain, Τήνελλα καλλίνικε, in which the first word imitates the sound of the lyre.

Although his work now only survives in fragments, Archilochus was revered by the ancient Greeks as one of their most brilliant authors, able to be mentioned in the same breath as Homer and Hesiod,[6] yet he was also censured by them as the archetypal poet of blame[45] – his invectives were even said to have driven his former fiancée and her father to suicide.

Ἀσπίδι μὲν Σαΐων τις ἀγάλλεται, ἥν παρὰ θάμνῳ ἔντος ἀμώμητον κάλλιπον οὐκ ἐθέλων· αὐτὸν δ' ἔκ μ' ἐσάωσα· τί μοι μέλει ἀσπὶς ἐκείνη; Ἐρρέτω· ἐξαῦτις κτήσομαι οὐ κακίω.

[49] The meter below is trochaic tetrameter catalectic (four pairs of trochees with the final syllable omitted), a form later favoured by Athenian dramatists because of its running character, expressing aggression and emotional intensity.

[23] The following verse is indicative too of the fragmentary nature of Archilochus's extant work: lines 2 and 3 are probably corrupted and modern scholars have tried to emend them in various ways, though the general meaning is clear.

II, 1882) There are about three hundred known fragments of Archilochus's poetry, besides some forty paraphrases or indirect quotations, collected in the Budé edition (1958, revised 1968) by François Lasserre and André Bonnard.