came to signify abuse and vilification.  As the taste for music and rhythm became general in that sunny clime, even these rioters adopted a kind of verse, by which rustic genius could give additional point to scurrility.  Thus arose the Iambic measure used at the festivals of Ceres and Bacchus, and afterwards fabled to have been invented by Iambe, the daughter of the King of Eleusis.  Hence, also, came the jesting used in celebrating the rites of Ceres in Sicily, and the custom for people to post themselves on the bridge leading to Eleusis in Attica, and to banter and abuse those going to the festivals.  The story of Iambe only marks the rural origin of the metre, and its connection with Ceres, the Goddess of Harvest.  Eleusis was her chosen abode, and next in her favour was Paros; and here we accordingly find the first improvement made upon these uncouth and virulent effusions.  About the commencement of the 7th century, Archilochus, a native of this place, harnessed his ribaldries better, and put them into a “light horse gallop.”  He raised the Iambic style and metre so as to obtain the unenviable notoriety of having been the first to dip his pen in viper’s gall.  Good cause had he for his complaints, for a young lady’s father, one Lycambes, refused to give him his daughter’s hand.  There was apparently some difficulty about the marriage gifts—­the poet having nothing to give but himself.  Rejected, he took to writing defamatory verses on Lycambes and his daughters, and composed them with so much skill and point that the whole family hanged themselves.  Allusions, which led to such a catastrophe, could not now be regarded as pleasantries; but at that time he obtained a high reputation, and perhaps the suicide of the wretched Lycambes was considered the best joke of all.[8] The fragments which remain to us of Archilochus’ productions seem melancholy enough, and the only place where he speaks of laughter is where he calls Charilaus “a thing to be laughed at,”—­an expression which would seem to point to some personal deformity—­we are told, however, by later writers, that he was a glutton.  In another remaining passage Archilochus says that “he is not fond of a tall general walking with his legs apart, with his hair carefully arranged, and his chin well shaven;” where we still detect the same kind of caricature, and in default of any adequate specimen of his “gall,” we may perhaps be excused for borrowing an illustration from Alcaeus, who lived slightly later; and who, speaking of his political opponent Pittacus, calls him a “bloated paunch-belly,” and a “filthy splay-footed, crack-footed, night fellow.”

Archilochus lived in the fable age, and the most perfect of the small fragments remaining of his works are of that allegorical description.  But he may be regarded as a representative of the dull and bitter humour of his time—­a large proportion of which, as in his writings, and those of Simonides and Hesiod, was ungallantly directed against the “girls of the period."[9]