One of the more recent strains of classical scholarship has been the examination of how Ancient Greek literature depicts women and what information we may glean from these texts about women’s place in antiquity. While women are infrequent and silent characters in much of what has been passed down to us, issues of sex and gender are to be found throughout a recently discovered fragment of Archilochus, commonly called “The Cologne Epode.” This is the longest extant fragment of poetry (P. Colon. Inv. 7511) attributed to Archilochus of Paros, a Greek lyric poet in the Archaic period. It was discovered in the 1960s in the wrappings of a 1st century AD Egyptian mummy in Abusir el Melek, a city on the west bank of the lower Nile. Attestations of Archilochus in antiquity suggest this fragment to have been one of his most famous works. He was revered as the inventor of iambos, the poetry of invective and censure. Most of the blame in the Cologne Epode is directed toward Neobule, “Miss Fickle.” Archilochus’ revenge against her is explicitly sexual; in this poem, questions of sex and gender are directly intertwined.
Modern scholarship of women in the ancient world have occasionally suffered from selective use of evidence and narrowly-framed questions. The Cologne Epode illuminates the complex ideological construction of women in Greek society. Marginalized through legal and social norms, women occupy a place of instability in a world that attempts to constrain them to pre-defined roles. Archilochus 196A, however, presents several moments in which they transgress these boundaries: rare moments of agency in a poem otherwise entrenched in the dominant ideology of its day. This article will focus on the sexual encounter itself: is this poem one of persuasion or violence?
The narrator urges the girl on throughout the poem, but the tone of many of these utterances is difficult to determine. “I will obey as you command me” (19) seems to suggest a consensual encounter in which the male and female communicate their desire reciprocally. Yet the female is mostly silent; indeed the function of her only speech in the poem is to reject the male’s sexual proposal. By contrast, a majority of the poem consists of the male’s speech. Finally, the poem ends with male climax. No mention is made of female pleasure, though this is not unusual considering Archaic Greek gender norms.
Nevertheless, the description of the sexual encounter is in many ways romantic. The action is almost impressionistic in its speed, the setting of a blossoming meadow traditional and sentimental. Compared to other iambic poetry of Archilochus, the “Cologne Epode” is startlingly discreet. One need only think of 42W for a reminder of the poet’s talent for graphic description:
"Like a Thracian drinking beer through a straw/or a Phrygian she slurped; and she was hard at it, bent forward."
In this fragment, Archilochus describes a female performing fellatio in humorous and explicit detail. Erotic iambic poetry contains a degree of vulgarity usually absent from Greek lyric and Archilochus certainly has no qualms about including lewd observations.
Having read the Cologne epode closely, considered the society in which it was created, and framed it in the context of the larger Archilochean corpus, it is clear that sex and gender function as complicating signifiers of power in the poem. While the poet condemns Neobule in misogynistic terms, he grants a degree of dignity to the second unnamed girl. Nevertheless, we are left to wonder how this sexual encounter will impact her at the poem’s close. The fragment is vague enough in its description of the act that it is impossible to determine whether or not the male and female have consensual sex. A society in which a woman’s sole value lies in her ability to birth legitimate heirs, in which female sexual desire is mocked and pleasure rejected, is not one that allows for the possibility of a tender, extra-marital sexual encounter.
This article argues for middle ground in our interpretation of the Cologne epode. Poetry is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Close reading of the poem suggests that the narrator feels genuine desire and affection for the unnamed girl and that she is, at the very least, allowed the small freedom of refusing full sexual intercourse. Though their sexual encounter is described in romantic terms, it is also true that the girl’s behavior would be seen as shameful in their society. Thus, Archilochus’ technique of generating plausibility about their encounter could potentially injure her reputation more than crude language alone. While in Archilochus’ contemporary society this poem could very well have caused the deaths of the girl and her family, today it illustrates for us the ways in which power has long operated through sex and gender.
