Note 29 — Women in Greek Poetry

To endeavour, as some have done, to reconstruct the satires of Archilochus from those of Catullus, is simply labour thrown away, because between the periods in which the two poets lived, the whole way of regarding women had been revolutionised, and ideas which seemed obvious to the Latin writer would have been unintelligible to the Greek. To Catullus thwarted love was an agony; to Archilochus it was an insult, and no man of his time would, or could, have regarded it otherwise. Thus, to suppose, as Lafaye (op. cit. l.c.) does, that the satires of Archilochus were interspersed with erotic passages, like Catull. xxxix. (a poem he considers to be imitated from Archilochus), is to suppose an anachronism.