The poetry of Hipponax poses special challenges to its interpreter. It reads unlike most extant poetry from the archaic period in both form and subject matter, and it gives no clear indication of its occasion or performance context. The defamiliarising effect produced by its unusual or foreign vocabulary and frequent depiction of bizarre scenarios is only compounded by its woeful fragmentariness. Yet Hipponax cannot be ignored: together with Archilochus (and to a lesser extent Semonides) he is a foundational practitioner of perhaps the most problematic of archaic song genres – iambos.Footnote ¹ He is influential on Hellenistic poets, and through them, ultimately on Roman poets too. It is important, then, that we understand Hipponax’ poetics, difficult a task though it might be, and we cannot afford to pass over what might be a programmatic scrap: a remnant of a poetic initiation. While no such fragment is included in the two standard editions of Hipponax (those of West and Degani),Footnote ² some scholars have suggested that we should recognise in a series of late testimonia the vestiges of a poem recounting the iambist's poetic investiture. Here I present some fresh evidence in support of this suggestion and attempt an interpretation of this proposed new fragment with the aim of teasing out some of its implications for Hipponax’ poetics.

The putative fragment of Hipponax’ poetic initiation is listed among the testimonia by Degani.Footnote ³ The passage is from the ninth-century grammarian Choeroboscus' commentary on Hephaestion, where he relates etymologies of the term iambos. To the well-known etymology drawn from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (198–211) Choeroboscus adds a further one involving an encounter at the seaside between Hipponax and an old woman who is washing wool:

This account of the term iambos appears to preserve an anecdote which includes a quoted line. That this reflects a poetic initiation in Hipponax’ poetry was argued independently by Ralph Rosen and Christopher Brown in 1988.Footnote ⁵ In an article published in 1990, Bob Fowler added a further two lines drawn from another – independent – witness:Footnote ⁶

This is evidently the same anecdote, with the important added detail that Iambe was mocking towards Hipponax. It provides us with a three-line citation to prove the aetiology as well as an elliptical account of its context, which locates the encounter in Eleusis. The additions regarding the mocking and the setting at Eleusis point to the connection between this alternative incarnation of Iambe and the Iambe of the standard aetiology for iambos and for the rituals of obscenity performed at the Mysteries and Thesmophoria.Footnote ⁸

Though the text offered by these testimonia is admittedly garbled, in essence it seems to reflect an account of Hipponax’ serendipitous encounter with Iambe, a character symbolic of his poetry, in which he receives from her iambos or, more probably, choliambos, as we shall see. This suggests the standard template of a poetic initiation, albeit a peculiarly lowly one.Footnote ⁹ As Fowler argues, it is highly unlikely that both the story and the verses that substantiate the story should have been made up by the scholiasts, and many of the details of the account remain unexplained, which suggests that some of the elements of the story have been lost in the retelling. The obscurity of Choeroboscus' narrative is best explained by supposing that it is an incomplete account of a poetic narrative in the poetry of Hipponax which included Iambe's iambic admonishment quoted by the two independent witnesses. This is supported by the fact that Choeroboscus' work on Hephaestion, normally described as a commentary or as scholia, is in fact headed in the manuscripts as being ἀπὸ φωνῆς; the meaning of this phrase at the time of Choeroboscus' activity has been shown to be not that the work is a diligent annotation of Hephaestion's text on the part of Choeroboscus, nor that it was copied down by express dictation, but rather that it was written down in the course of lectures or classes by his pupils.Footnote ¹⁰ This process would easily have resulted in the kind of elliptical and garbled account we find in our testimonium.

As both Brown and Fowler pointed out, one might still object that there remains the possibility that the anecdote and the verses hark back not to Hipponax himself but to a later source – an extract from a comedy or a Hellenistic poem about Hipponax. However, this explanation should probably be ruled out in light of a number of suggestive allusions to the Hipponactean initiation on the part of the Hellenistic poet Herodas in his own scene of poetic initiation in Mimiamb 8 and in his programmatic Mimiamb 1: Herodas would undoubtedly have been looking back to Hipponax himself rather than to a later story about Hipponax.

Mimiamb 8 survives only in tantalising fragments and the details of the narrative are unclear. The extant text opens with a master awakening his slaves with extreme (Hipponactean, one might say) invective. He then goes on to recount the dream from which he has just awoken. In his dream he drags a goat out of a gully, and this is then killed and sacrificed by some goatherds. There is mention of a young man wearing a saffron tunic and an ivy wreath (he is probably Dionysus), and of a game of askoliasmos, which the speaker wins hands down; at this point, an old man threatens the speaker with a staff. Here the dream ends and the speaker proceeds to offer an interpretation. This is where the damaged papyrus picks up again:Footnote ¹¹

The speaker explains the dream as an allegory of the success of his poetry despite criticism, and he describes himself explicitly as Hipponax’ heir. Even from these sparse details it is clear that there is a rich metapoetic subtext; this has given rise to much scholarly debate but the intricacies of this do not concern us here, for what matters most to us is the role of the character of Hipponax.Footnote ¹² The old man of the dream-sequence has frequently been identified with Hipponax, though the identification remains a matter of debate.Footnote ¹³ My suggestion is that the dream-sequence involving the old man replays the poetic initiation of Herodas' avowed model Hipponax, and that this allusion supports the identification. In addition to activating a connection between the old man and Hipponax, the allusion also gives a context for understanding the old man's anger, which some scholars have found problematic in a passage in which Herodas is celebrating his poetic predecessor.Footnote ¹⁴ Although the old man's venomous temper is true to Hipponax’ poetic persona (as well as to Herodas' own persona in the opening of the Mimiamb), his attack on Herodas in the dream calls for an explanation. Both Rosen and Hunter have suggested that Hipponax’ wrath towards Herodas is motivated by the latter's encroachment into his poetic domain.Footnote ¹⁵ This may well be the case, but the passage acquires further point from allusion by Herodas in his poetic initiation to Hipponax’ own poetic initiation.

The similarities between the dream-sequence and the testimonium to Hipponax are clear: in both passages the poet is abused by a figure emblematising his chosen poetic form. The cantankerous old man with a walking stick who rails at the encroaching author and who stands for the genre of ‘limping’ iambos evokes the cantankerous old woman who symbolises Hipponax’ new genre in his initiation. The reference to ‘lame’ Hipponax is reinforced by the verbal allusion at l. 60: τῆι βατηρίηι κό[ψω < Hipponax fr. 20 W² (8 Dg) δοκέων ἐκεῖνον τῇ βακτηρίῃ κόψαι,Footnote ¹⁶ so that the words Herodas puts in the old man's mouth are taken straight out of Hipponax’. What is more, Herodas appears here to be alluding not only to Hipponax’ persona but also to his poetry's frequent references to characters and scenes from the Odyssey. Indeed one of the most remarkable features of Hipponax’ corpus is the pervasive and sustained intertextuality with the Odyssey, and there are suggestions that Hipponax’ speaking persona was to some extent identified with Odysseus as the wrathful disguised beggar of the second half of the epic.Footnote ¹⁷ At ll. 58–60 of the Mimiamb, the figure of the angry old man closely evokes that of Odysseus in the guise of a beggar: χερσὶ δὲ μή τι λίην προκαλίζεο, μή με χολώσῃς, | μή σε γέρων περ ἐὼν στῆθος καὶ χείλεα φύρσω | αἵματος (‘Don't provoke me to violence, don't anger me, lest, though I am an old man, I spatter your chest and lips with blood’, Od. 18.20–2).Footnote ¹⁸ The significance of the Odyssean nature of Hipponax’ persona will become clearer in the concluding part of this discussion.

The hypothesis that Herodas is aware of and alluding to Hipponax’ initiation by the old woman Iambe is further supported by references to an iambic old woman in the equally programmatic Mimiamb 1. This Mimiamb dramatises the old procuress Gyllis' attempts to persuade the young Metriche to lend her services as a lover to another man while her beloved or husband is away. As Hunter noted, Gyllis here stands for Herodas' new kind of iambos: she comes beating on Metriche's door in the first line of the poem and ‘literally opens the door to a new poetic form, whose self-conscious lowness is marked by her crude beating (ἀράσσειν) on the door’.Footnote ¹⁹ When Metriche sets eyes on Gyllis she exclaims ironically that a goddess has appeared among mortals and remarks that she had not seen her for quite some time ‘not even in a dream’ (οὐδ’ ὄναρ, 11); though the expression is colloquial it is hard not to be reminded of Herodas' own dream and, more generally, of the fact that Hellenistic poetic initiations are typically cast as dreams.Footnote ²⁰ Gyllis explains her long absence by saying that she lives a long way away and ‘in the lanes the mud comes up to your knees' (ἐν δὲ τῆις λαύρηις | ὀ πηλὸς ἄχρις ἰγνύων προσέστηκεν, 13–14), a description of her whereabouts that adds to her characterisation, especially since σποδησιλαύρα was another word for a prostitute.Footnote ²¹ In this programmatic context where Hipponax cannot be far from one's mind, and when qualified as unbearably muddy, the word λαύρα is probably calculated to evoke its frequent use in Hipponax in suggestively or overtly obscene contexts (fr. 155 W² = 40 Dg; 61 W² = 63 Dg; figuratively at fr. 92 W² = 95 Dg). Moreover, it is at least intriguing that Gyllis claims that the occasion on which the young man Gryllos fell for Metriche is the festival of the descent of Mise, who was an analogue of Baubo/Iambe in the Eleusinian mysteries as the old woman who cheered up Demeter by exposing her genitalia, and thus persuaded her to take food.Footnote ²² All this reinforces the connections between this old woman and Hipponax’ old Iambe, who, as we will see, is also probably presented as a prostitute. These connections are then confirmed later in the Mimiamb when, in indignation at Gyllis' proposal, Metriche threatens to make her sing ‘a limping song with a limp’ (χωλὴν δ’ ἀείδειν χώλ’ ἂν ἐξεπαίδευσα, 71). So the old woman Gyllis is convincingly viewed as a personification of Herodas' new semi-dramatic choliambic genre and as an allusion to the old woman Iambe, who gave Hipponax his new genre of choliamb. In Herodas' initiation in Mimiamb 8, the γέρων Hipponax himself takes the place of the old woman to pass on the baton of choliambic composition, or at least to wave it threateningly. The two Mimiambs (1 and 8) work in tandem as a manifesto for this new choliambic genre, and both look back to Hipponax through allusions to his poetic initiation.Footnote ²³

Herodas' initiation is characteristically in dialogue with a variety of other texts besides Hipponax. The opening of the dream bears the hallmarks of other more typical scenes of poetic initiation:Footnote ²⁴ the narrator is alone in an isolated pastoral setting, dragging along a goat. It reminds us particularly of the archetypal initiation of Hesiod as he tends his sheep on Mt Helicon (Theog. 22–34) and of Archilochus as he takes his cow to the market (though we cannot say whether this was told by Archilochus himself in his poetry, or whether it was a story told about him after he became a Parian celebrity).Footnote ²⁵ And of course by naming himself a successor of Hipponax, Herodas is adopting the familiar Hellenistic practice of claiming poetic authority from a great figure of the past.Footnote ²⁶

Hipponax too, like Herodas, shapes his initiation in sophisticated dialogue with the wider poetic tradition, but his own claim to poetic authority is rather more problematic. He appropriates the Iambe of the Homeric Hymn and Eleusinian ritual and transposes her in his initiation to play the part of the Muses in the standard template of scenes of poetic initiation as seen in the cases of Hesiod and Archilochus. Iambe's functional role as a mocker in Demeter's story affords him a good link to the ‘initiation’ template, which includes an offensive address by the deity: we see this for instance in Hesiod, where the Muses call shepherds ‘ignoble disgraces’ and ‘mere stomachs’ (κάκ’ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον, Theog. 26). In Archilochus' initiation, the poet and the Muses engage in banter and jesting, clearly illustrating the nature of Archilochus' poetry. If we are willing to believe that the outline of this story harks back to Archilochus' own poetry, then Hipponax can be seen to go one further by showing himself being addressed offensively by the very personification of iambic scorn. We might see yet another term of engagement in Stesichorus if, as some have argued, the story of his famous Palinode harks back to a biographical narrative in his poetry of his epiphanic encounter with Helen (perhaps itself a twist on the initiation template?).Footnote ²⁷ If a first-person account of an encounter between the poet and the beautiful ever-young Helen who scolds him had achieved notoriety by the middle of the sixth century it would offer to Hipponax another good model of poetic ‘authentication’ for inversion or subversion.

However that may be, this story of Hipponax’ topsy-turvy poetic investiture which enacts his peculiarly low poetics can be pressed still further by speculating on the detail of this encounter on the seaside with an old woman washing wool. In her original ritual context, Iambe's role is as a lowly character who provokes laughter through obscene banter; these aspects of her character are elaborated in the testimonia through the detail of the wool-washing and the use of the word καταμωκησαμένη. We might note additionally that the verb πλύνω, which recurs in both versions of the testimonium, is also a slang term for ‘giving someone a dressing down, drenching them in abuse’ (LSJ s.v. ii). What is more, it is possible that in Hipponax’ version the Iambe of the Eleusinian aetiology is turned – by a typically Hipponactean reconfiguration – into an aged prostitute. References to prostitutes and their activities occur in Hipponax’ corpus with a frequency unparalleled in any other archaic poet, so that it would be unsurprising if this, too, were such a reference.Footnote ²⁸ One of the alter-egos of Iambe as a ritual character is Baubo (a third, Mise, we have already encountered above in relation to Mimiamb 1); according to the Orphic version of the story, Baubo cheered up Demeter by performing ἀνασυρμός, that is to say by lifting up her skirts to reveal her pudenda.Footnote ²⁹ This kind of obscene behaviour would provide an author such as Hipponax with an easy transition to the notion of prostitution, all the more so since the term ἀνασυρτόλις appears in Hipponax with the meaning of ‘prostitute’.Footnote ³⁰ There is a large body of evidence – iconographical, literary, archaeological, epigraphic – linking prostitutes to the working of wool;Footnote ³¹ though this is not uncontroversial, when taken as a whole it does seem to point to the fact that the activities of prostitution and wool-working could be seen to go hand in hand both in real life and in the imagination of poets and painters (and ageing prostitutes in particular would presumably have had to rely increasingly on wool-working). The identification of the old woman who personifies Hipponax’ new iambic genre with a prostitute fits well, as we have seen, with the tenor of Herodas' allusions in Mimiamb 1.

The notion that Hipponax may have been riffing on existing aetiologies for iambos or ritual practices associated with it is arguably reinforced by some suggestive similarities with an anecdote reported by Athenaeus and ascribed to Theophrastus' On comedy (Athen. 6.261d–e = Theophr. no. 709 Fortenbaugh). Almost nothing is known about this Peripatetic work (attested also by Diogenes Laertius, Vitae 5.46) but one wonders whether, following the ideas of Aristotle, Theophrastus may have had something to say on iambos too and whether this anecdote fitted in such a context.Footnote ³²

The structural similarities (as well as the verbal echo: δεδοίκατε μὴ τὸ σφάγιον ὑμῶν ἀνατρέψω; ~ ἄπελθε, τὴν σκάφην ἀνατρέπεις) to the situation we find in Hipponax are striking: in both cases there appears to be an interloper in a ritual situation (in Hipponax’ case this is implied by Iambe's Eleusinian associations and the fact that washing in the sea was a preliminary to taking part in the Mysteries) who behaves inappropriately, is the object of abuse, and is a source of humour. According to Fortenbaugh, here the joke hangs on the pun between σφάγιον (a bowl for catching the victim's blood) and σφαγεῖον (the sacrificial victim).Footnote ³³ The potential for wordplay may be present in our Hipponactean testimonium, too: in its primary meaning the word σκάφη denotes a bowl used for washing, but it can also denote a light boat or skiff, as it does in Aristophanes' Knights 1315. (One is tempted to wonder if the ambiguity has some of the implications of the modern expression ‘to rock the boat’.) It is worth noting that Eustathius repeats Athenaeus' anecdote with almost identical wording but with an intriguing variation: the motivation ascribed to the Tirynthians for wanting to change their laughing ways is that they are σκωπτόμενοι, ‘targets of mockery’ – a term which affords an easy link to iambos.Footnote ³⁴

So much for possible models and backgrounds. The low register of Hipponax’ poetic initiation produces a pleasing contrast with its almost literary sophistication. We have seen that Choeroboscus reports a variant of the story and quotation which makes this an aetiology specifically for choliambos. This version of the story is supported by the additional lines of the fragment as reconstituted by Fowler, if the last word of the second line is not corrupt (since φαίνῃ as the last word of the line gives us a choliamb). This invites a reading of the episode as a self-conscious variation of the standard etymology for iambos (as suggested by the Homeric Hymn), which Hipponax twists into an account of how he got his choliambos. The passage would then be a remarkable archaic prefiguration of later self-consciously literary programmatic statements by a poet who is instructed by his divine patron to swerve away from the established manner of composing poetry. At the beginning of the Aetia, for instance, Apollo tells Callimachus that he should be composing a different kind of poetry from the norm, and he does so in a speech which enacts his new dense elegiac style.Footnote ³⁵ Ovid opens Book 1 of his Amores by having Cupid give him both his new subject matter and his meter when he prevents him from writing about heroic deeds and subtracts a foot from his hexameter; more suggestive still with respect to the role played by emblematic women in Hipponax and Herodas is the opening of Book 3, which gives us an initiation-like encounter with female personifications of poetic genres who instruct Ovid on the kind of poetry he should be writing.Footnote ³⁶

The poetic implications in our Hipponactean testimonium of this strange encounter on the shore can be pressed still further in light of Hipponax’ frequent parodic intertextual relationship with the Odyssey. The substitution of sour old Iambe, perhaps a prostitute, in place of the Muses is a familiar Hipponactean inversion. Moreover, in a departure from the model of poetic initiation as seen in Hesiod and Archilochus, Hipponax is not a herdsman, and the landscape is not a mountain-glade but the seashore. Perhaps this, too, is a form of inversion, but in the context of Hipponax’ sustained engagement with the Odyssey and identification with Odysseus, this relocation of the scene from a mountain-glade to the seashore betokens another aspect of Hipponax’ poetics, for it cannot fail to evoke the meeting between Odysseus and the laundering Nausicaa in Book 6 of the Odyssey,Footnote ³⁷ itself modelled on the template of the Homeric encounter with a divinity (Odysseus approaches Nausicaa as a goddess). The transformation of the maidenly Nausicaa into an aged prostitute would be a vulgar gesture in tune with Hipponax’ use of the Odyssey in other extant fragments (for instance fr. 17 W² = 24 Dg, which depicts ‘Arete’ involved in some kind of undignified sexual activity). Hipponax’ initiation also evokes the several scenes in the final books of the Odyssey in which Odysseus is the target of mockery by various members of his household while disguised as a beggar (just as Hipponax’ iambic persona, as we have noted, is ‘disguised’ as both beggar and Odysseus).Footnote ³⁸ Moreover, the cledonomantic aspect of the old woman's utterance directed at Hipponax could be reminiscent of another scene of cledonomancy in the final books of the Odyssey in which Odysseus' climactic revenge over the suitors is anticipated. At Od. 20.97–121 Odysseus prays to Zeus for a sign and overhears the mill-woman pray that this be the last day she works for the suitors.Footnote ³⁹ Here we would have Hipponax manipulating an Odyssean persona in a peculiarly debased Odyssean world in enactment of his poetics, while in turn commenting on the Odyssey's own peculiar ideological sensibility and affinity for ‘low-status’ themes.Footnote ⁴⁰

If scenes of poetic initiation and appeals to the Muses have the function of authorising the poet's voice, of giving him authority, then what does this parody of an initiation, with ageing Iambe in place of Nausicaa in place of the Muses, tell us about Hipponax’ authorial voice? Once again comparison with the other scenes of poetic investiture which we have discussed is instructive. In the cases of Hesiod, Archilochus and Stesichorus, reference to the author in poetic investiture serves to validate his authority: poetic discourse is anchored to a specific named individual and thereby gains poetic authority. Conversely, in Hipponax, even when the speaking persona presents himself qua poet, not only does he undermine himself by inversion and lowness of register, but what is more he seems to hide behind the fictionalised mask created by the intertextuality with the second half of the Odyssey. Hipponax’ choice of Odysseus as the character through which to fictionalise his speaking persona is pointed: Odysseus is the hero of fictional self-representation par excellence. Again and again, the Odyssey focuses on the hero's lying manipulations. It is Odysseus who gives us the earliest extended first-person narrative in Greek poetry as well as what is probably the most developed narrative of concealed identity.Footnote ⁴¹ He provides an excellent model for Hipponax’ play with poetic persona, all the more since Odysseus is repeatedly likened to a poet in the Odyssey.Footnote ⁴² All in all, Hipponax’ initiation gives us clues to a poetic sophistication perhaps hitherto not fully recognised: it is no wonder that he was such a favourite in Hellenistic times.