Archilochos Quotes

“Her breasts and her dark hair were perfume
and even an old man would desire her.”
― Archilochos

“This wheatless island stands like a donkey's back.
It bristles with a tangle of wild woodland.
Oh,
there is no country so beautiful,
no sensual earth that keys my passion
as these plains around the river Siris.”
― Archilochos

“Passionate love relentlessly twists a chord
under my heart and spreads deep mist on my eyes,
stealing the unguarded brains from my head.”
― Archilochos

“Let brawling waves beat his ship
against the shore, and have the mop-haired Thracians
take him naked at Salmydessos,
and he will suffer a thousand calamities
as he chews the bread of slaves.
His body will stiffen in freezing surf
as he wrestles with slimy seaweed,
and his teeth will rattle like a helpless dog,
flopped on his belly in the surge,
puking out the brine. Let me watch him grovel
in mud—for the wrong he did me:
as a traitor he trampled on our good faith,
he who was once my comrade.”
― Archilochos

“Go take your cup and walk along the timber deck
Of our roaming ship; drain the hollow casks
Of all their red wine. How can we stay sober
on the watch when all the rest are drunk?”
― Archilochos

“The gold booty of Gyges means nothing to me.
I don't envy that Lydian king, nor am I jealous
of what gods can do, nor of the tyrants' great
powers. All these are realms beyond my vision.”
― Archilochos

“My lord Apollo, single out the guilty ones,
and in your customary way, destroy them all.”
― Archilochos

“Suppose, in our time, the War actually comes. With no current refinements wasted, the elephantine blasts, fire storms, and fallout finish their appointed tasks. Several decades later the literary archaeologists from Tierra del Fuego and the Samoyedes rake loose from London's heaps part of a volume of literary criticism in which stand, entire, Yeats' lines 'My fiftieth year had come and gone'⁠—and the 'Second Coming,' with a few single lines quoted amid the unknown critic's comments. Then a gutted Pittsburgh mansion yields two charred anonymous sheets of a poem whose style⁠—what can be seen of it⁠—resembles Yeats. A fragmentary dictionary cites, as a rare alternate pronunciation of fanatic: "F⁠á-na-tic. Thus in W. B. Yeats' 'Remorse for Intemperate Speech'". There are similar further recoveries, equally scanty. So much for the poet whom T. S. Eliot has called the greatest of the twentieth century.
But this has happened already, in time's glacial cataclysm, to the greatest lyric poet (so men say) of the West before the thirteenth century—to Sappho. And to Archilochos, whom some ancients paired with Homer. And to many others, the Herricks, Donne, and Herberts of Greece's first lyric flowering. For however much one may take it as unmerited grace that one at least has Homer, at least the iceburg tip of the fifth century and its epigones, one must still question the providence which allowed from the vastly different age between—the Lyric Age of the seventh and sixth centuries—only Pindar and the scraps for one other small book. That uniquely organic outgrowth of successive literary styles and forms in Greece—forms which are the ineluctable basis for most Western literature—is thus desperately mutilated for us in what seems to have been its most explosively diverse and luxuriant phase.”
― William E. McCulloh

“Look, Glaukos, how heavy seawaves leap skyward!
Over the Gyrai rocks hangs a black cloud,
a signal of winter storm.
From the unforseen comes fear.”
― Archilochos

“When dead no man finds respect or glory from men
of his town. Rather, we hope while alive for some
favor from the living. The dead are always scorned.”
― Archilochos

“I live here miserable and broken with desire,
pierced through to the bones by the bitterness
of this god-given painful love.

O comrade, this passion makes my limbs limp
and tramples over me.”
― Archilochos

“Let the stone of Tantalos
no longer overhang this island.”
― Archilochos

“They laid down their lives
in the arms of waves.”
― Archilochos

“I am a servant of the kingly wargod Enyalios
and am also skilled in the lovely arts.”
― Archilochos

“I pray for one gift: that I might merely touch
Neoboule's hand.”
― Archilochos

“Let us hide the dreadful
gifts of lord Poseidon.”
― Archilochos

“Glaukos, soldier of fortune, will be your friend
until he begins to fight.”
― Archilochos

“Father Lykambes, what is this new silliness?
Are your natural brains wholly rotted?
The neighbors laugh openly at your absurd life
and you persist in chattering like a cricket.”
― Archilochos

“All, O all the calamities of all the Hellenes
are set loose on this battleground in Thasos.”
― Archilochos

“Like the Mykonians, Perikles,
you drink our unmixed wine
and pay for nothing.
You broke into this party, uninvited,
and act as if among old friends.
Your stomach has tricked the brains in your skull
and now you are shameless.”
― Archilochos

“As the figtree on its rock feeds many crows,
so this simple girl sleeps with strangers.”
― Archilochos

“His penis is swollen
like a donkey from Priene
taking his fill of barley.”
― Archilochos

“Many of them, I hope, will be dried up
by the sharp rays of the sun in its zenith,
by the sun in the time of the Dog Star.”
― Archilochos

“My javelin is good white bread and Ismarian wine.
When I find rest on my javelin I drink wine.”
― Archilochos

“O father Zeus, you who control the cosmos,
and oversee the actions of man,
his criminal and lawful acts,
you also judge the arrogance and trial of wild beasts.”
― Archilochos

“Lady, you are much too old
to rub yourself with perfume.”
― Archilochos

“You have taken in many blind eels.”
― Archilochos

“She is a common woman for rent,
but what sensuality and fat ankles.
O fat whore for hire!”
― Archilochos

“Say goodbye to the island Paros,
farewell to its figs and the seafaring life.”
― Archilochos

“Broad earth, now you entomb Megatimos and Aristophon
who were the two tall columns of this island Naxos.”
― Archilochos (attributed)