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IN A FAMOUS ELEGY, ARCHILOCHUS LOSES HIS SHIELD on the battlefield, but saves himself and declares he will soon acquire a replacement just as good (5 W):1
...
Someone of the Saioi is exulting in my shield, a faultless weapon,
which I left behind, not willingly, by a bush.
But I saved myself. What's that shield to me?
Let it go. I'll get one again no worse.
Commentators have long assumed that the poet literally "threw away his shield" to run from battle, and so have tended to focus on how to understand that action. Ancient critics cite the elegy as evidence that Archilochus was a shameless coward who deserved censure and rebuke. This view was already well established in fifth-century Athens. Critias remarks that the most disgraceful of all the poet's actions was that he "threw away his shield," and Aristophanes draws on aspects of the poem to characterize Cleonymus, a favorite target of comic abuse, as a "shield thrower" (...).2 Another version of the poem reported by Sextus Empiricus Pyrrh. hypot. 3.216) presupposes a tradition of interpreting the poem as indicating cowardly flight on the part of Archilochus: this version records at the opening of line 3 the phrase ....3 On the other hand, the worship of Archilochus as a warrior and patriot in hero cult on Paros indicates that there was no consensus among ancient readers of the same poems about the character of the poet.4
In this paper I propose that Archilochus is not actually presenting his retreat as an act of cowardice, nor is he shamelessly dismissing his action (...). Archilochus is neither a coward, as ancient critics believed, nor a determined subverter of the heroic ethos as modern critics have frequently argued. Instead, Archilochus composes a song about a human situation that occurs on the battlefield, one that is a cause for a rueful and ironic reflection spoken in the persona of a soldier in the field.
At first glance the view that Archilochus ran from his battle post in order to save his life seems self-evident. The opening couplet sets a scene of heroic encounter on the battlefield and is answered in the second couplet with the declaration that the poet saved...