Hipponax

late 6th century BC),[1] of Ephesus and later Clazomenae, was an Ancient Greek iambic poet who composed verses depicting the vulgar side of life in Ionian society.

[2] Ancient authorities record the barest details about his life (sometimes contradicting each other) and his extant poetry is too fragmentary to support autobiographical interpretation (a hazardous exercise even at the best of times).

[5] According to Athenaeus, he was small, thin and surprisingly strong[6] The Byzantine encyclopaedia Suda, recorded that he was expelled from Ephesus by the tyrants Athenagoras and Comas, then settled in Clazomenae, and that he wrote verses satirising Bupalus and Athenis because they made insulting likenesses of him.

[8] Hipponax in that case closely resembles Archilochus of Paros, an earlier iambic poet, who reportedly drove a certain Lycambes and his daughters to hang themselves after he too was rejected in marriage.

[14][15] The poet is a man of action but, unlike Archilochus, who served as a warrior on Thasos, his battlefields are close to home: Take my cloak, I'll hit Bupalus in the eye!

[16]Hipponax's quarrelsome disposition is also illustrated in verses quoted by Tzetzes, where the bard abuses a painter called Mimnes, and advises him thus: when you paint the serpent on the trireme's full-oared side, quit making it run back from the prow-ram to the pilot.

[18] Unlike Archilochus, however, he frequently refers to himself by name, emerging as a highly self-conscious figure, and his poetry is more narrow and insistently vulgar in scope:[19] "with Hipponax, we are in an unheroic, in fact, a very sordid world",[20] amounting to "a new conception of the poet's function.

[28] He employed a form of Ionic Greek that included an unusually high proportion of Anatolian and particularly Lydian loanwords,[29] as for example here where he addresses Zeus with the outlandish Lydian word for 'king' (nominative πάλμυς): Eating, defecating and fornicating are frequent themes and often they are employed together, as in fragment 92, a tattered papyrus which narrates a sexual encounter in a malodorous privy, where a Lydian-speaking woman performs some esoteric and obscene rites on the narrator, including beating his genitals with a fig branch and inserting something up his anus, provoking incontinence and finally an attack by dung beetles—a wild scene that possibly inspired the 'Oenothea' episode in Petronius's Satyricon.

[33] Archilochus might also have been the source for an unusually beautiful line attributed to Hipponax[nb 2] (a line that has also been described "as clear, melodious and spare as a line of Sappho"):[34] Hipponax influenced Alexandrian poets searching for alternative styles and uses of language, such as Callimachus and Herodas,[36] and his colourful reputation as an acerbic, social critic also made him a popular subject for verse, as in this epigram by Theocritus rendered here in prose: or in this 19th century rhyming translation by C.S.Calverley: Ancient literary critics credited him with inventing literary parody[39] and "lame" poetic meters suitable for vigorous abuse,[40] as well as with influencing comic dramatists such as Aristophanes.