Archilochus

"Some Saian mountaineer Struts today with my shield. I threw it down by a bush and ran When the fighting got hot. Life seemed somehow more precious. It was a beautiful shield. I know where I can buy another Exactly like it, just as round."

"A Saian boasts about the shield which beside a bush though good armour I unwillingly left behind. I saved myself, so what do I care about the shield? To hell with it! I'll get one soon just as good."

"I don't give a damn if some Thracian ape strut Proud of that first-rate shield the bushes got. Leaving it was hell, but in a tricky spot I kept my hide intact. Good shields can be bought. (as translated by Stuart Silverman)"

"Let who will boast their courage in the field, I find but little safety from my shield. Nature's, not honour's, law we must obey: This made me cast my useless shield away, And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life, which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain; But who can get another life again?"

"I have saved myself - what care I for that shield? Away with it! I'll get another one no worse."

"These golden matters Of Gyges and his treasuries Are no concern of mine. Jealousy has no power over me, Nor do I envy a god his work, And I do not burn to rule. Such things have no Fascination for my eyes."

"The affairs of gold-laden Gyges do not interest me zealousy of the gods has never seized me nor anger at their deeds. But I have no love for great tyranny for its deeds are very far from my eyes."

"Be bold! That's one way Of getting through life. So I turn upon her And point out that, Faced with the wickedness Of things, she does not shiver. I know how to love those Who love me, how to hate. You whom the soldiers beat, You who are all but dead, How the gods love you And I, alone in the dark, I was promised the light."

":translated by Guy Davenport, Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochus (1964)"

"Heart, my heart, so battered with misfortune far beyond your strength, up, and face the men who hate us. Bare your chest to the assault of the enemy, and fight them off. Stand fast among the beamlike spears. Give no ground; and if you beat them, do not brag in open show, nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry. Keep some measure in the joy you take in luck, and the degree you give way to sorrow. All our life is up-and-down like this."

": Fragment 67, as translated by R. Lattimore"

"Soul, my soul, don't let them break you, all these troubles. Never yield: though their force is overwhelming, up! attack them shield to shield..."

": "Archilochos: To His Soul" : A fragment as translated from the Greek by Jon Corelis"

"Take the joy and bear the sorrow, looking past your hopes and fears: learn to recognize the measured dance that orders all our years."

"Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous, now that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made night out of noonday, hiding the bright sunlight, and . . . fear has come upon mankind. After this, men can believe anything, expect anything. Don't any of you be surprised in future if land beasts change places with dolphins and go to live in their salty pastures, and get to like the sounding waves of the sea more than the land, while the dolphins prefer the mountains."

"Zeus, the father of the Olympic Gods, turned mid-day into night, hiding the light of the dazzling Sun; and sore fear came upon men."

"I have a high art: I hurt with cruelty those who wound me."

": Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Vol. 20 (2001), p. 184"

"I have a high art; I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me."

": Quotations for Martial Artists : Hundreds of Inspirational Quotes to Motivate and Enlighten the Modern Warrior (2003) edited by John D. Moore"

"ὦ Ζεῦ͵ πάτερ Ζεῦ͵ σὸν μὲν οὐρανοῦ κράτος͵ σὺ δ΄ ἔργ΄ ἐπ΄ ἀνθρώπων ὁρᾶις λεωργὰ καὶ θεμιστά͵ σοὶ δὲ θηρίων ὕβρις τε καὶ δίκη μέλει."

"πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἐχῖνος δ'ἓν μέγα"

""Old women should not seek to be perfumed" (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, first ebook edition, 2014)"

"Summa in hoc vis elocutionis, cum validae tum breves vibrantesque sententiae, plurimum sanguinis atque nervorum, adeo ut videatur quibusdam quod quoquam minor est materiae esse, non ingeni vitium."

"There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory... Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second."

"Archilochos was both poet and mercenary. As a poet he was both satirist and lyricist. Iambic verse is his invention. He wrote the first beast fable known to us. He wrote marching songs, love lyrics of frail tenderness, elegies. But most of all he was what Meleager calls him, "a thistle with graceful leaves." There is a tradition that wasps hover around his grave. To the ancients, both Greek and Roman, he was The Satirist. We have what grammarians quote to illustrate a point of dialect or interesting use of the subjunctive; we have brief quotations by admiring critics; and we have papyrus fragments, scrap paper from the households of Alexandria, with which third-class mummies were wrapped and stuffed. All else is lost. Horace and Catullus, like all cultivated readers, had Archilochos complete in their libraries. Even in the tattered version we have of Archilochos … the extraordinary form of his mind is discernible. Not all poets can be so broken and still compel attention. Archilochos kept his "two services" in an unlikely harmony. Ares did not complain that this ash-spear fighter wrote poems, and the Muses have heard everything and did not mind that their horsetail-helmeted servant sometimes spoke with the vocabulary of a paratrooper sergeant, though the high-minded Spartans banned Archilochos's poems for their mockery of uncritical bravery. And the people of his native Paros made it clear, when they honored him with a monument, that they thought him a great poet in spite of his nettle tongue."