c. 680–645 BC · Greek lyric poet from Paros, and a soldier
Archilochus is one of the earliest Greek poets whose voice we can still hear, and he was genuinely a fighting man — which is presumably why a military maxim drifted to him rather than to some other ancient. But the voice is all wrong for it. He is sardonic, obscene and deflating: he jokes about abandoning his shield, mocks the swaggering officer and prefers the short bandy-legged one who stands his ground, and turns invective into an art form. He is also the man behind the fox-and-hedgehog line that Isaiah Berlin made famous, which shows how readily a single fragment of his can be lifted into modern service. Almost nothing survives whole.