Archilochus and Lycambes

Abstract

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 (οἴην Λυκάμβεω παῖδα τ⋯ν ύπερτέρην), in fr. 33 (where the voice of ‘the daughter of Lycambes’ is mentioned) 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.