SOURCE: “Archilochus and His Senses,” in The Classical Journal, Vol. 57, No. 7, 1962, pp. 289-96.

[In the following essay, Will analyzes Archilochus's method of conveying his sensory experiences through the meter and diction of his poetry.]

The immediacy of Archilochus' sense-experience to his poetry strikes us first in meter. This is something new. We never feel, with Homer or Hesiod, that the lived texture of the poet's experience is directly translating itself into the sound of his verse. Rather we seem always, in those two writers and throughout the epic cycle, to be hearing an impersonal, “epic” voice. Those creators address us from the end of an “epic” culture, the Mycenaean, and though Hesiod (fl. 730) may have been no more than three generations older than Archilochus (fl. 660), his aural tone sounds far older.¹ It is deeply embedded in the past. Archilochus, as a person, reaches us immediately, and from his own present, through sound.

It is significant, then, that he expressed himself through sensuous, heavily rhythmic, quickly oscillating meters.² The ancients, who admired Archilochus greatly—often classing him with Homer, in fact—considered him the inventor of the iamb; thus of one of the most “heavily sensuous” Greek meters. Certainly he is the first extant Greek poet to offer us this meter. (What other poets may be lost, we can not even begin to guess.) He used the iamb pre-eminently in his satires (the verb iambo means “to assail”), where it reinforces and grows from the meaning of his feelings. For example (Frag. 31):

Old woman that she was, she failed to bathe,

(Translation, here and throughout this article, mine unless otherwise indicated. Textual references are to Bergk, Poetae lyrici Graeci, Leipzig 1915, vol. 2.)

Or (Frag. 33):

An awful racket roamed the house.

This is the meter of many of his erotic poems, too, where aural sensuousness interweaves with sensuous meaning. In those erotic poems Archilochus also, frequently, combines trochees with iambs, letting the two meters vacillate in a potent counterpoint. Even the trochee, as Archilochus manipulates it, is sensuous. Occasionally, as in some of his tetrameters, he writes purely trochaic verse. Fragment 50 reads:

Homeless, fellow-citizens, now grasp my words …

Or (Frag. 52):

So the wretchedness of all the Greeks had come to Thasos …

In Archilochus both of these chief meters rely on abrupt and sensuous rhythmic emphases, by contrast, say, with the epic dectyl, which is more monotonous, and less tense.

In conjuring up the sensuous qualities of the iamb and the trochee in this early lyric poet, it is useful to remember certain conditions of the production of his verse. Unfortunately, little is known. The way in which Archilochus composed his works is not clear. No doubt, in the first half of the seventh century, he could write. But did he compose in that way? Or did he compose by singing? In any case he does speak of reciting to the flute (Frags. 76, 123), and that alone proves that he must have been highly conscious, as creator, of the pitch and key of his prosody, as well as of its simpler stress pattern. Here, then, we have a kind of index of the sensuous subtlety of his work. This index becomes more meaningful when we remember that Archilochus' verse, with its musical accompaniment, was intended for public recital, like Homer's and Pindar's poetry. On such occasions, Archilochus' poetry may have sounded more like musical recitative than like poetry as we know it. We can only insist, in reconstructing that atmosphere, that the innate sensuousness of his meter, as we read it now, must have been created into an originally all-embracing sensuous context. In trying to grasp this situation, we must make the same kind of effort as in assessing the overall sensuous creation of the Greek temple, with its organic interfunctioning of shape, medium, and color.

Nor is it enough just to appreciate the immediate social-sensuous context of Archilochus' verse: we must also remind ourselves of the sensuous-historical background of that verse. We must recall that although Archilochus was the literary founder of the iamb, and although he is the first extant Greek poet to offer us trochees, there was a communal choral-religious origin for both meters which reached far into the past. For one thing, the exchanging of insults and obscenities in iambic meter was an approved part of early Greek religious ceremonies.³ But there is a further explanation for the early use of those meters. Both iambs and trochees are appropriate to rapid dances: dactyls by contrast are not. It is assumed that dances in those meters took place in festivals of Demeter and Dionysus, that is in religious fertility ceremonies. The name ithyphallic, given to one of the oldest trochaic forms, points to this origin. There is a passage in Aristophanes' Frogs (386 ff.) in which a rural celebration of Demeter is recited in hopping iambic dimeters, in the way that we can well imagine it was done long before Archilochus. The sensuousness of these meters in Archilochus, then, has a sensuous-historical context. His importance is not lessened when we know that context. These meters rise directly from inside him, not from any subservience to tradition. He used his prosodic tradition, we may assume, because it suited his aesthetic needs. His inner sense-experiences found appropriate form in such meters.

Discussion of the qualities of meter, despite all appeals to historical context, runs a particular danger of appealing solely to private taste. Let us turn to the question of the kind of experience Archilochus seems to embody in meter; to the experiential content of his poetry. It may be asked, in view of Archilochus' reputation as the first Western lyric poet, whether his content is not simply “himself.” It is a truism that the lyric is an expression of the self. But this is a great simplification. Even the Homeric epic, in a sense, is an expression of self. That epic is simply a more oblique expression of the self, one conditioned by more “external” factors, such as contemporary social conventions, verbal traditions, or inherited stories. The ancient lyric, in distinction to the later “romantic” lyric, was also seriously bound by “external” conditions, was in many ways cut off from spontaneous self-expression. In this it was a characteristically Hellenic product; the ancient lyric must be seen in the context of the whole Greek poetic atmosphere. Archilochus, for instance, made no effort to “express himself,” at least in the sense we customarily give to that phrase. He had neither desire nor possibility to express some ineffable, disembodied essence, “himself,” and thus to be freed of the inner oppressiveness of selfhood. Neither did other Greek lyric poets—Solon or Sappho—attempt such a radical, modern act. Werner Jaeger put the Greek situation well, when he wrote:

… Greek expressions of personal emotion and thought have nothing purely and exclusively subjective in them: it might rather be said that a poet like Archilochus has learnt how to express in his own personality the whole objective world and its laws—to represent them in himself.⁴

Archilochus, as poet, is particularly anxious to register the sense-events, or feelings, of his own being—the intersections of himself with the experienceable world—rather than to reach to the immovable, and soul-like, within. In this he and his contemporaries distinguish themselves from the mystic in search of his soul, as well as from the Symbolist poet, a Mallarmé or Verlaine, in search of sufficiently attenuated imagery to translate the ineffable within.

Both chronologically and in degree of importance, the first sense-origin of events for Archilochus is his body, that gross and beautiful first boundary with what-is. If we wish to think of Greek lyric poetry as a step in the growing awareness, by the human being, of himself, as part of the Selbstentdeckung des Menschen, we need not be surprised by the major importance played by body in this discovery. A child becomes aware of and through his body first, and only much later grows aware of the mind “inside” it. Some of the early Greek lyric poets are like children in this respect. Archilochus himself is not merely preoccupied with the elements of the life of his body, but primarily with its sexual responsiveness: preoccupied “psychologically,” that is, as well as in the texture of his meter, which, as we have noticed, itself often has a transparently erotic rhythm.

A few of Archilochus' fragments concern his reproductive organs (Frags. 47, 136). It is important to notice these passages, because they help us to see on what an intimate level Archilochus is prepared to confront and transcribe personal experience. They also show us how little pruient this poet—like his contemporaries—was; by these simple, direct, unembarrassed utterances we are transported to the pre-prurient age of Greece, to that first stage of self-discovery, in the eighth and seventh centuries, when sexual repression was relatively slight, when poetry was not yet, as it would be in the fifth century, a compensation for loss, but was still continuous with “real life.” Much of the earlier attitude is to be found in Archilochus' erotic poetry. He translates it through such lines as (Frag. 72):

Just to fall upon her swelling womb
Meeting her thigh to thigh.

The physical is alleviated of grossness, turned into an accomplishment. When it came to poetry, Archilochus was in artistic control of his passion. He could also translate tenderness with a strange tangible line (Frag. 71):

If only I could touch my loved-one's hand.

The sensual excitement is here very light, but it breathes over the line and leaves a simple finality. In these lines in which the basic sense-life of the body is brought into poetry—scarce lines, as everything connected with Archilochus is scarce⁵—we read the controlled closeness of that poetry to the poet's sense-life. That particular life—so differently from the lives of Homer or Hesiod—is providing the raw material of his poetry.

The personae of his body—for to certain poets the inner organs may become virtually that, as though they were actors in a drama—sometimes take the stage metaphorically as well as in person in Archilochus' poetry. The following lines (Frag. 103) are an example:

Such is the passion for love that has twisted its way beneath my heartstrings
and closed deep mist across my eyes
stealing the soft heart from inside my body …

(Trans. Lattimore)

At first one is reminded, almost, of the formulaic death of an Homeric hero. The physical picture looks comparable. In fact, though, we have here an originally worked, and thoroughly unheroic, expression of refined sense-experience. (Archilochus never disappoints us with facile language.) The “heart” seems to be felt half-physically, half-symbolically. So do the “mist,” and the “body.” We are not yet in the language-world—of romantic “heart,” “bosom,” and “hand”—which tends to translate the physical into purely non-physical terms. “Heart” and “eyes” are by no means simply metaphors here. Nor, on the other hand, do the physical terms in our passage refer to anything merely physical. Archilochus is clearly not considering the same heart that a physician considers. We are here in a language-world which retains the physical object, but in a volatilized, and lightened, condition.

A similarly intermediate physical-spiritual inner event is translated in the following lines (Frag. 84):

Wretchedly I lie desiring,
Soulless, with an anguish from the gods
Transfixed, clear through the bones.

The last words, “transfixed (or stuck), clear through the bones,” are more than a conventional, sentimental lover's outcry, although they are partly that. They seem to translate pain through evoking a physical experience which never “really” happened, yet one which could not be described in any but physical terms. The “bones” in this fragment are not real bones, any more than they are whatever might be merely symbolized by the notion of “bones.” They are real-unreal bones.

The chief source of sense-experience for Archilochus, as for most poets, is neither his inner sexual tensions nor his spiritual-physical romantic feelings. It is the events of his eye. He treats us to many fresh visual experiences in his language. In one of his finest iambs he gives us a pure vision of the eye, undisturbed by reflection (Frag. 29):

She held a branch of myrtle and
Flowering rose and down her back
And shoulders flowed her hair.(6)

A beautifully simple fidelity to sense-experience is the source of the poem's purity and stillness; the poem has a pellucid, sensuous surface, which reminds one of the “innocence” of some of Archilochus' most erotic fragments (Frags. 47, 72, 136). That is not to say, here or in any fragments previously considered, that Archilochus' verse is, in a passive way, simply an “imitation” of inner events. Even in this fragment his symbolical translation of experience is oblique. Yet we can feel that some limpid visual image or images generated this small poem. The border between art and life is distinct but narrow here.

The eye could not often be, for Archilochus, even as passive a part of the body as it appears in this poem. Not only sexual and romantic-pathetic awarenesses, but also visual awareness tended toward mental awareness with Archilochus. In the following fragment (Frag. 21) we see comment appended to vision, and emerging from it:

Like the spine of an ass this island
Stands, with timber for a crown.
Not a lovely or a wanted place,
Or charmed, as one upon the banks of Siris.

Here the poet describes the rough island of Thasos, contrasting it to the beauty of South Italy. Unlike the vision of the last fragment, this one—the first two lines, that is—contains an image, a simile, and in that loses something of its purely visual sense-character. Vision is tinged. But even this vision is not permitted to stand alone. It is merged into an evaluation which it, itself, seemed to point toward. With the second pair of lines added, the mood of the first two is transformed. We are made to experience the completion of the implication of the first two lines—as we learn that Thasos is a grim island. Vision has proven continuous with attitude.

The fusion of vision with reflection, their simultaneous expression, is not common in Archilochus, because he is so radically a poet of the senses. That is one way of explaining what is unusual in the following often-discussed fragment (Frag. 58):

I don't like the towering captain with the spraddly length of leg,
one who swaggers in his lovelocks and cleanshaves beneath the chin.
Give me a man short and squarely set upon his legs, a man
full of heart, not to be shaken from the place he plants his feet.

(Trans. Lattimore)

The sensual images of the two kinds of men described—“towering,” “spraddly,” “squarely”—contain the relevant reasons for such men being likable or not. The very way the men are being seen is the source of the attitude with which they are being seen. The participles and adjectives describing the men, through which they are made visible, are also vehicles of Archilochus' attitude toward them. The kind of half-sensuous translation of experience, as we find it here, is related to the kind of metaphorical language of “heart” and “mist” which we noticed above (Frags. 84, 103). It is the language of sense-experience penetrated with attitude and understanding.

In these characteristic ways in which Archilochus deploys his visual experience in his poetry, we see various stages of the lyric transcription of sense-experience. We have noticed above, too, that Archilochus refines more or less on pure sexual, or on romantic, sense-awareness. Man's life needs constantly to be caught up in progressively more “spiritual” layers of awareness, to be released and lightened with metaphor. Archilochus responds to this demand in a series of intermodulated efforts, through which we see the integrity of his effort to be true to his sense-experience. By contrast with this effort, in fact, Archilochus' attempts to think through his verse are paltry.

We must ask ourselves whether Archilochus had a poetic philosophy, whether a small universe of responses, in all its completeness, reflects itself from the body of his verse. As some of the preceding quotations have illustrated, Archilochus had a point of view, an angle of vision. It emerges more or less directly from his sense-experience. It was neither a consistent point of view, nor a reflective one: but it was a consistent mood in which his senses happened to transact aesthetically with the outer world. There is more than this, though. There are persistent conceptual themes in Archilochus' poetry, and though they add up to very little, as a testimony to abstract thought, or even as poetically integrated thought, it is worth considering those concepts if only to gain negative evidence that Archilochus was a poet of the senses. As it is, many of his “ideas” seem to be simply reflexes from his sense-experience. He writes (Frag. 65):

One main thing I understand,
to come back with deadly evil at the man who does me wrong.

(Trans. Lattimore)

This “idea” in Archilochus is hardly more than a nagging animal reflex, and it recurs often in his poetry, as we might expect. It is dominant in those scattered and furious iambs which he hurled at the man, Lykambes, who refused him his daughter in marriage, iambs which reputedly drove both father and daughter to hang themselves. In those attacks, Archilochus seems to have written directly out of the turbulence of his sense-life. On a more reflective level, he offers prudent statements based on his direct experience of the world. We read (Frag. 56):

To the gods all things are easy. Many times from circumstance.
of disaster they set upright those who have been sprawled at length
on the ground, but often again when men stand planted on firm feet,
these same gods will knock them on their backs, and then the evils come,
so that a man wanders homeless, destitute, at his wit's end.

(Trans. Lattimore)

It is interesting to see here, in a different guise, the images of uprightness, and square-stance, which we saw above (Frag. 58) in the lines describing two kinds of soldiers. In our present passage, the images have been heightened almost entirely into metaphor and as a result—in this poem—virtually stripped of their poetic power. What we have here, rather, is the minimal effort of a man who wants to generalize his experience. These are lines of folk-wisdom, the outcome of experience of practical life. From his experience Archilochus draws a private rule of life (Frag. 66):

… and if you beat them, do not brag in open show,
nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry.
Keep some measure in the joy you take in luck, and the degree
you give way to sorrow. All our life is up-and-down like this.

(Trans. Lattimore).

The tough mercenary soldier, who in another fragment insisted that pleasure could make nothing worse, agrees here that it is wise not to tempt the variable gods with displays of extreme feeling. Such practical wisdom is the summit of Archilochus' philosophy. Concepts were not, for him, either continuous with his poetic sensibility, or generative ways into poetry.

Do we see in Archilochus, the first consequential lyric poet in the western tradition, a new awareness of the self, or an expression of greater subjectivity after the relatively impersonal—or at least highly “projected”—age of the Homeric epic? After the rather schizophrenic verbal world of Hesiod, torn between its epic form and the demand for personal intervention? The answer is “yes,” but, as has been suggested already, it needs to be qualified. Certainly the ego is prominent in Archilochus' poetry. He tells us what he feels, what he sees, what he thinks he should do. He represents “his own” inner life openly and fully. What is more, and what is more significant, he does this with ease. His ease, particularly, differentiates him from Hesiod, the first European poet to name himself in his work. When Hesiod tells us that the Muses of Helikon addressed him, or that he once travelled to Chalkis in order to participate in a singing-contest, he introduces himself awkwardly. He finds it hard to “be in” his poetry, and is obviously ill at ease there. Archilochus is perfectly at ease in his own poetic illusion.

Yet though he handles himself successfully, as an ingredient of his poetry, it is worth repeating the earlier remark that Archilochus implicitly looks on himself as closely related to the outer world. His best poetry emerges from the point of contact between sense-impressions and his self. That point of contact is crucial to his artistic success. Archilochus is only incidentally concerned with the self in a metaphysical sense. He is not plumbing his own depths. Perhaps we should rather say, as Jaeger implies in the lines already cited, that Archilochus is interested in himself as subject, that his poetic stance is one of relative subjectivity, and yet that Archilochus, as subject, always requires an object, an experience in terms of which to exist.

What, looking more closely, seems to be the character of Archilochus' subjectivity? The double meaning of the word “subject” may help us to develop an answer. Not only does Archilochus appear in his poetry as a grammatical subject, an “I”—that is, as subject of various sense-experiences, the person who “has” those experiences—but he appears also in subjection to those experiences. This is the more significant aspect of his poetic being, and the aspect which deserves more attention. Archilochus is basically a center of awareness which is impinged on by a multitude of sense-impressions which are the basic level of his world, which to a great extent simply are his world. To this extent, one might say, he is almost the victim of his sense-impressions. The point is important; turning it into more philosophical language, we might say that sense-impressions are accidents of Archilochus' substance, that they happen to him. This subjective situation can be put into a wider context by an historical comment.

In modern times many thinkers—Goethe, Schiller, or Kant, for instance—have analyzed the aspects of man's being through which he is sensually aware, that is, the sensuous aspects of his being. Each of those three thinkers asserted, in his way, that mankind, through its senses, is a part of nature. The sensuous part of the human being is antirational, essentially without intelligible form. This part of our natures, they held, is fate, weight, matter. It is true that these same thinkers also insisted that man has supersensuous powers. Reason (Vernunft), in various meanings of the word, was the one of those powers they most admired. But they felt that sense-experience is cut off from reason. This description and “location” of sense-experience helps toward understanding the subjectivity of Archilochus in its second, passive meaning. A good part of Archilochus' mode of being did belong to nature.

Yet there is another relevant historical point here, one made especially by Kant, in his reflections on the relation of art to sensuous experience. Kant argued that aesthetic creativity is one way in which mere sensuous experience can be removed from the realm of nature toward, though never quite to, the realm of Reason. Through form, Kant believed, man can virtually rescue, that is universalize, certain of his fleeting sense-experiences. Kant was only one of many modern thinkers who considered art an effort to intermediate between “lower” and “higher” human faculties. But Kant's own thought, in particular, is relevant to the present point. Just as his thinking might help us to locate and understand Archilochus' sense-experience, so it might help us also to see the context of Archilochus' rescuing of that experience through form. Archilochus was struggling against mere subjection to the sense-world. In this he was in the major tradition of the Greek lyric.

In fact, with Archilochus' subjection to sense-experience went a distinctive and eternal lyrical motive. That motive is the urge to conquer the mere particularity of the sense-event, the sensual accident which happens to the self.⁷ Essentially the self is hostile to the accidental, to luck. A lyric poet, it seems, wants to translate the here-and-now limitation of sense-experience into a formal expression, art, which confers some exemption from place and time, and thus gives the self momentary power over “the accidental.” Archilochus' disciplined, clear poems prove that this motive was powerful in him. It operated, as we can judge, not to control any ordinary sense-world, but to control the particularly intense world of his own senses. That was the world which he struggled to universalize. Exercising this control cannot have been an easy battle even for a tough Parian mercenary. Yet he won, and we are grateful.

Notes

1. For a recent effort both to date those writers, and to characterize their rapidly changing social environment. cf. A. R. Burn, The lyric age of Greece (New York 1960).

2. For general discussions of Archilochus' prosody, cf. Amédée Hauvette, Archiloque (Paris 1905) pp.132-162; and, more recently, the treatment in Archiloque: fragments (Paris 1958) pp. lxii-lxix, by François Lasserre.

3. Cf. Hauvette, op. cit., pp.140 ff. The social-religious origins of the lampooning iambic spirit, as well as of the verse-form itself, are taken up by Werner Jaeger, Paideia I (trans. Highet, New York 1939) pp.119-121. He shows that we need not consider Archilochus' lampoons products of strong spite: they could have been traditional releases of communal emotion.

4. Jaeger, op. cit., p.114.

5. But constantly less scarce. There have been numerous discoveries, in recent years, which have added both to our knowledge about Archilochus' life, and to the body of his poetry. For a recent survey of the additions, cf. A. Giannini, “Archiloco alla luce dei nuovi ritrovamenti,” Acme 11 (1958) 41-96.

6. It is interesting and surprising to read the comment on this fragment by J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek poets, 1 (New York 1901) p.280:

   Greek sculpture is not more pure in outline than the following fragment, which sets before our eyes the figure of a girl embossed on marble or engraved in chalcedony …

   Does Symonds think that the poem is describing a work of art? Probably the girl is a prostitute.

7. Hermann Fränkel, Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums (New York 1951) p.191, writes of Archilochus:

   Die Weltgeschichte verblasst gegenüber dem was sich im eignen Umkreis begibt.

   Fränkel's whole chapter on Archilochus, pp.182-207, explores the poetic mentality of the lyric poet ingeniously and from many angles.