Hipponax

Hipponax was an Ancient Greek iambic poet active in the second half of the sixth century BCE, originally from Ephesus and later based in Clazomenae. According to ancient sources, he was expelled from Ephesus by the tyrants Athenagoras and Comas before settling in Clazomenae. He was known for his malicious wit and for composing verses that depicted the vulgar, unheroic side of Ionian life. His poetry frequently attacked contemporary sculptors, particularly Bupalus and Athenis.

One account claims that Hipponax sought to marry Bupalus’s daughter but was rejected due to his physical ugliness, and that Bupalus then made insulting likenesses of him. In retaliation, Hipponax wrote such savage verses that Bupalus hanged himself—a story that closely parallels the legend of the earlier iambic poet Archilochus, raising doubts about its accuracy. Another version of the dispute involves a woman named Arete, who appears in fragments as both the mother of Bupalus and a sexual partner of Hipponax. The poet was reputed to be small, thin, and surprisingly strong, though his physical deformity may have been a literary invention inspired by the nature of his work.

He composed in the iambic tradition, but is credited with inventing the choliambic meter, or “halting iambic,” which substitutes a spondee or trochee for the final iambus, suiting his burlesque themes. His surviving fragments also include trochaic tetrameter and dactylic hexameter, the latter used for mock-heroic parody of Homer. He frequently employed Lydian loanwords, as in an address to Zeus using the Lydian word for “king.” His poetry dwells on eating, defecating, and fornicating, often combined in graphic scenes, such as a fragment describing a sexual encounter in a malodorous privy involving a Lydian-speaking woman and obscene rites. Despite the interest of Alexandrian scholars, who collected his work in two or three books, only fragments remain.