Epode 10: the Mystery of Mevius' Crime Horace's tenth Epode, an inverse propempticon, calls down dire curses on the head of a man named Mevius as he leaves on a sea-voyage.1 Scholars have naturally been interested in what Mevius had done to merit such treatment, but answers have been difficult to find, for nothing explicit is said on this topic in the poem; as Leo noted, ‘[Horatius] ne verbo quidem tarn gravis odii causam indicat’. This is in direct contrast with (...) the Strasbourg epode usually attributed to Hipponax , which served as Horace's model in this poem; there it is clear that the similar curses on a departing sailor are caused by his breaking of oaths to the poet and betrayal of their previous friendship . One might expect Horace to give some kind of indirect suggestion of the nature of Mevius’ offence, but even this is despaired of by Fraenkel: ‘There is no hint at the sort of crime which Mevius is said to have committed, nor is anything said about the man himself; he remains an entirely shadowy figure’. The best that scholars have been able to do is to follow the ancient commentary of Porphyrio in suggesting that Horace's Mevius is to be identified with the poetaster attacked by Vergil in Ecl. 3.90 ‘qui Bavium non odit, amet tua carmina, Mevi’. Though it is pleasant to think of Vergil and Horace, perhaps by now friends in the circle of Maecenas, ganging up on a luckless hack, there is, as Fraenkel points out, no mention in the tenth Epode that Mevius is a poet, and his literary incompetence, assuming he is Vergil's poet, does not seem to underlie or indeed warrant the bitter imprecations of the poem: Catullus might wish a dire fate on the works of a bad poet , but to long for their author's shipwreck and consumption by gulls might indeed seem excessive. (shrink)

In the for 1952 , pp. 33 ff., Nikolaos M. Kontoleon published a most interesting inscription from the shrine of Archilochos on Paros. It was inscribed, as preserved, on two orthostats, which probably formed part of the structure of the hearth or bothros where offerings to the hero were made. There is much of interest to scholars in this new discovery, which is very fully and carefully interpreted by Kontoleon, and has been further discussed by Werner Peck . In this (...) article the present writer wishes to confine himself to some comments on the new evidence about responses of the Delphic oracle supplied by the inscription. This material is all found on the first of the two orthostats, and falls into two categories: responses connected with the setting up of the shrine, and responses connected with the life of Archilochus. (shrink)

Epode 10: the Mystery of Mevius' Crime Horace's tenth Epode, an inverse propempticon, calls down dire curses on the head of a man named Mevius as he leaves on a sea-voyage.1 Scholars have naturally been interested in what Mevius had done to merit such treatment, but answers have been difficult to find, for nothing explicit is said on this topic in the poem; as Leo noted, ‘[Horatius] ne verbo quidem tarn gravis odii causam indicat’. This is in direct contrast with (...) the Strasbourg epode usually attributed to Hipponax, which served as Horace's model in this poem; there it is clear that the similar curses on a departing sailor are caused by his breaking of oaths to the poet and betrayal of their previous friendship. One might expect Horace to give some kind of indirect suggestion of the nature of Mevius’ offence, but even this is despaired of by Fraenkel: ‘There is no hint at the sort of crime which Mevius is said to have committed, nor is anything said about the man himself; he remains an entirely shadowy figure’. The best that scholars have been able to do is to follow the ancient commentary of Porphyrio in suggesting that Horace's Mevius is to be identified with the poetaster attacked by Vergil in Ecl. 3.90 ‘qui Bavium non odit, amet tua carmina, Mevi’. Though it is pleasant to think of Vergil and Horace, perhaps by now friends in the circle of Maecenas, ganging up on a luckless hack, there is, as Fraenkel points out, no mention in the tenth Epode that Mevius is a poet, and his literary incompetence, assuming he is Vergil's poet, does not seem to underlie or indeed warrant the bitter imprecations of the poem: Catullus might wish a dire fate on the works of a bad poet, but to long for their author's shipwreck and consumption by gulls might indeed seem excessive. (shrink)

A persistent ancient tradition has it that a man named Lycambes promised his daughter Neoboule in marriage to the poet Archilochus of Paros, that he subsequently refused Archilochus, and that the poet attacked Lycambes and his daughters with such ferocity that they all committed suicide. When we reflect that the iambographer Hipponax drove his enemies Bupalus and Athenis and Old Comedy a man named Poliager to suicide, that the ancestress of iambos, Iambe, killed herself, and that all these suicides, like (...) those of Lycambes and his daughters, took the form of hanging, we will not take too seriously the ending of the story of Archilochus' relations with Lycambes and his family. However, it seems now to be generally accepted, at least among English-speaking scholars, that the whole Lycambes tradition is to be rejected. The present note seeks to demonstrate that this extreme scepticism is misguided. I shall begin with a survey of Archilochus' references to Lycambes and his family to ascertain how far the indirect tradition is consistent with the surviving fragments. Lycambes appears to have played a consistent role in Archilochus, as far as the fragments allow us to see. In fr. 38 he appears as the father of two daughters , in fr. 33 as the father of at least one daughter. In fr. 71 his role cannot be determined. But in fr. 54, if his name is correctly restored in v. 8, he may again figure as the father of a daughter, for a female is mentioned in the fragment, whether for good or ill. If his patronymic is correctly supplied in fr. 57.7, it may be significant that the letters πατρ occur in the same verse. (shrink)