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text:pigres_poems

Elegy and Iambus. with an English Translation by. J. M. Edmonds. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1931. 1.

Pigres: Poems

Pigres:—A Carian of Halicarnassus, brother of the Artemisia who was so famous in the wars.1 He inserted an elegiac (pentameter) after each line of the Iliad, thus:

Sing thou the wrath, O Goddess, of Peleus' off-spring Achilles, Thine are the bounds which hold, Muse, all the ends of our art.

He also wrote the Margites and the Battle of Frogs and Mice , attributed to Homer.

Suidas Lexicon


“In his account of the battle of Salamis he spends more words upon Artemisia than he does on the whole battle; and lastly at Plataea he says that the Greeks sat still, and knew no more of the fight till it was over than if it had been a battle of frogs and mice like that described in a burlesque poem by Artemisia's brother Pigres; for they had agreed, he says, to fight in silence lest the others should hear them; and he makes the Spartans show themselves no better than the Barbarians in valour, but win a victory over naked and unarmed men.”

Plutarch The Malignity of Herodotus


1 the mss add ‘wife of Mausolus,’ which cannot be right

text/pigres_poems.txt · Last modified: 2014/01/15 11:59 by 127.0.0.1