Hipponax, 6th Century BC

Bonus Definition of the "Killing Joke"

“Legend has it that if Hipponax wrote a parody of you it was so biting that you killed yourself.” - Carlo Parcelli

Here’s another type of Killing Joke: the joke itself doesn’t kill - people who hear it don’t die laughing ala Monty Python - but the derision hits home to a fatal degree. You can’t live with yourself under the onslaught of Hipponax’s caricature. Parcelli brought this to my attention, appropriate input from the caustic author of Canis Ictis in Exsilium (Dog Bite in Exile). Enter his world of verbal pyrotechnics and cerebral scathing hilarity at Poet Vaudevillian.

Luckily I’ve known about Hipponax a while through my old friends from Old Songs¹, a band that sets ancient Greek poetry to old-timey music. I happen to have on hand a wonderful chapbook from them of Hipponax translations with commentary.

So, please note all translations below are from Old Songs (thank you Liz Downing, Mark Jickling, and Chris Mason) and I’m leaning on their commentary for orientation to Hipponax’s texts and historical facts - all misinterpretations are mine.

Here’s my favorite example of a biting line in Hipponax - I don’t think it kills, though.

You drink like a lizard in the toilet

Not much has made it through the ages. All we have are fragments to sift through in order to figure out what could account for the legend. Hints of bitter wit, lots of insults, scurrilous lines - his images are vigorous. We really don’t have enough of the work to know how well it worked as a satirical “scourge to his enemies” (Old Songs on the ancient testimony).

idiot judge

creaks like some kind of owl in the outhouse

He was rich and lazy once
Feasting on tuna with spicy cheese sauce
Like a Lampsacanian eunuch

lazy dog

he urinated blood and defecated bile

your beak as hungry as a heron's

son of a fig-eater

I had to look up Lampsacanian and discovered Lampsacanus was a city on the Hellespont famous for its wine and prosperous enough to mint gold coinage. Also, figs seem to figure recurrently in the historical record of people who have died laughing (starting with Chrysippus as mentioned here, but you’ll see when my book comes out there’s more). Hipponax’s insults verge on curses - killing wishes, if not killing jokes. He has an outright curse poem attributed to him, which includes a reason for his harmful intent: “I want this to happen to him/ he who treated me bad.” Also attributed to Archilocus, that one. Curses are malicious word magick. In the poem, someone is wished to be washed ashore, vomiting seaweed - “He who went back on his word/ he who was once my friend.”

Hipponax is sometimes credited as the originator of iambic verse, but Archilocus came before him. Hipponax is probably responsible for the related choliambic line, a “lame” or “limping” meter - halting, deliberately clunky and harsh. Perfect for mockery, fake epic parody, bad attitudes, and raw, lowbrow rhythms of the street or country road.

He hardly could hope for literary immortality. Hipponax couldn’t say to himself and whatever circle he might’ve had, like Sappho, “Someone will remember us…” What’s lasted of his deliberately bad verse was useful somehow for scraps. Grammarians preserved some words or phrases, not usually for their poetry, but for linguistic interest in his utilization of various meters, dialects, and abusive slang.

A couple of stanzas add up to the first parody, perhaps. Mock-heroic Homeric.

Muse, tell of the son
of Eurodontiamon
The sea-swallowing one
Who slices up food in his gut
And wolfs down all of his grub

People cast your vote
And deal him an ugly fate
Upon the sand to croak
Beside the barren sea

I don’t want to downplay his influence: apparently, his satire was understood and its methods passed along, his forms - “badness” of style - appreciated for their crude appropriateness to his content. Aristophanes and Petronius likely looked back to Hipponax.

Plus, the myth itself of his cutting words having led to the suicide of real-life antagonists correlates with a couple of names, seemingly stock characters, still mentioned in the ancient tradition after his day.

Hipponax’s enemies were thought to be the sculptor Boupalos and his brother Athenis, both of whose lives are better documented as historically existing than Hipponax’s. It is said Boupalos hanged himself due to retaliatory verses Hipponax bruited about because he found the former’s artistic depiction of him unflattering. Both brothers seem to have lived longer than Hipponax, evidence against any actual suicide.

Boupalos, in addition to his later mention in comedic context without connection to Hipponax, has a comic name, rooted as “Bull-Phallus” - and its boop, bop sounds are slapstick. Hipponax coupled him with a supposed mother-figure, Arete, and obscenely lambasted their sex acts. The irony of her name, understood as “virtue,” sets her up as a comedic stage stereotype as well, within the trope of purity corrupted - making Boupalos a clown villain. A real person turned into a stock comic character? Maybe not suicide-inducing, but you would cry too if it happened to you.

Hold my coat while I hit Boupalos in the eye

First him, then Arete
Drinking toasts from the pail

They were drinking from a bucket
Not from a cup

Pulling back his bad-luck foreskin
Motherfucker Boupalos with Arete

He’s pretty much in the gutter making Boupalos a laughingstock. It could be supposed Hipponax was slumming, as there’s some indication of noble status in the meaning of his name, “lord of horses.” Regardless, he didn’t write for respectable or prudish company.

Further in the dirt…

I pulled it out to the very tip
like a sausage drying on the line

After all that work, I was like a wrinkled sail

Then in butt-talk: plug up the butt-gate!

In that last, he was punning about the fortifications of Pygelia, a real town, easily heard in the Greek as “butt-town.”

Hipponax’s poetic diction: down to dirty words and phrases - vulgar, pornographic, scatalogical. Old Songs sometimes translates one word into a multifarious run-on interpretation, as with “alibas”: “dried out sour vinegar corpse.” Sometimes all you have is one word as a token of his scurrility.

speared-ass whore-signal

glutton donkey

too-quick-to-fuck

small coin/prostitute's fee

filth-hole

stink!

If Hipponax began his journey highborn and rich, his poetry likely left him in poverty. Not to assume autobiography in his poetic I, he knows how to express self-pity, along with indocile rage against unmet needs - a beggar’s demands followed by a beggar’s curses. Beneath these, though, a beggar’s lament: “You didn’t give me no coat,” “You didn’t give me no shoes.”

I mentioned a poet of praises last time, St. John Perse. The Old Songs commentary tells how, according to Pindar, poets of blame die miserably while poets of praise (like Pindar himself) receive life’s rewards.

If at bottom, Hipponax’ poetry is a plaint of the embittered and impoverished, maybe some sympathy is due for one who went beyond dogbite cynicism in disagreeableness. For a time, proverbial bids for charity went: “Give a coat to Hipponax.”

Hippo Snacks

In a similar vein, in lieu of flowers (or laurel crown), I hereby offer Hipponax’s hungry corpse the sustenance of a bad pun - he deserves no less.

1. Check out Old Songs at PennSound for recordings of Sappho, Alcaeus, Alcman, and more. Scroll to the bottom of the page for their complete album of Hipponax.

The last song is of the lovely stanza below, described in Old Songs’ commentary as “the only Hipponax fragment that appears to reach toward the transcendent.”

Hermes
Blissful Hermes
You know how to
Wake the sleeper