[In the following excerpt, Hudson-Williams outlines some of the problems scholars face in trying to determine accurate dates in the life of Archilochus.]

I

ARCHILOCHUS AND CALLINUS; CHRONOLOGY

Ever since the dawn of literary criticism there has been much wordy warfare over the rival claims of Archilochus and Callinus to be regarded as ‘the Father of Greek Elegy’. …

We have really no fixed date in the history of Archilochus; he certainly lived in the seventh century b. c., and heard of Gyges and his wealth (see infra, p. 12). No definite information can be extracted from the famous description of the noonday eclipse (Arch. 74); the words with which Aristotle introduces his quotation (Rhet. 3. 17) are of some significance. As Hauvette (Archiloque, p. 14) has pointed out, they at least make it unnecessary to suppose that the poet was describing an event which he himself, or indeed any of his contemporaries, had witnessed; however vivid the verses may appear to us, we have no right to assume that Archilochus was relating a personal experience. He might be referring to an ancient tradition about the eclipse of 763 b. c., or perhaps to the eclipse visible to the east of Rhodes in 657 b. c.; it is of course still more likely that the eclipse was the one seen at Thasos in 648 b. c.; but the fragment certainly does not justify us in assuming that Archilochus must therefore have been at Thasos in 648 b. c., still less in regarding 6 April 648 b. c. as ‘the first exact date we have bearing on the history of Greece’ (Bury, History of Greece, p. 119).

The ancient chronologists could not agree about the date of Archilochus; Eusebius sets his floruit about 665 b. c., others (including Eusebius himself on another occasion) give 688 b. c.; Cicero reproduces a tradition which made him a contemporary of Romulus (i. e. 753-716 b. c., Tusc. 1. 1. 3), while Cornelius Nepos is said by Gellius (17, 21) to have mentioned Archilochus as a poet famous in the reign of Tullus Hostilius (672-640 b. c.).

Hauvette in his brilliant monograph on Archilochus (Paris, 1905) has sought to place our chronology on a more solid basis by utilizing an inscription discovered at Paros and first published by Hiller von Gärtringen in 1900; he claims to have refuted a view regarded as self-evident by many modern critics, viz. that the ancients had no traditional data for a life of Archilochus. A careful consideration of his arguments has not convinced me that a hitherto unknown historian, Demeas of Paros, wrote about the middle of the fourth century b. c. a treatise on Archilochus from which the literary historians of Greece derived their information regarding the Parian poet; for a full discussion see my review of Hauvette's Archiloque in the Classical Review for August 1907. It will be seen from the passages cited that even for Strabo and Clement the priority of Callinus to Archilochus was only something to be inferred from a comparison of the two poets' writings, and their chief argument is drawn from a line of very doubtful interpretation. … If Strabo has a sound basis for his statement about the reference made by Callinus to the prosperity of Magnesia and its success in the war against its neighbour Ephesus, then we must admit a similar soundness of information for his remark about the connexion of Callinus 3 … with the taking of Sardis, an event which occurred about 655-652 b. c. Our evidence would then come to this; Callinus mentions an incident that happened about 655-652 b. c. and other events of previous date; Archilochus perhaps refers to an eclipse which he saw in 648 b. c., and perhaps also to an occurrence that cannot be dated much later than 650 b. c. (the fall of Magnesia), an event that, assuming Strabo to have all the requisite data at his disposal, was not mentioned by Callinus.

Strabo was probably not sufficiently acquainted with the poetry of Callinus to justify him in drawing any conclusion from the apparent absence of a reference to the destruction of Magnesia. Further, it is by no means certain, to judge from the extant fragments, that Archilochus ever did refer to the destruction of Magnesia; ‘the woes of the Thasians’, of which he preferred to sing (if the amended text can be taken as correct), did not include the destruction of their state; and finally it should be remembered that we know far too little about the history of the period or the writings of Callinus to justify us in altogether ignoring the remarks of Athenaeus. …

In any case the mention or failure to mention the fall of Magnesia can give us no clue. We may safely regard the two poets as contemporaries; further than that it would be risky to go; we must leave this quarrel of the ages still unsettled and be content to say with the cautious Roman:

quis tamen exiguos elegos emiserit auctor
grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est.

(Horace, A. P. 77, 78.) …