HIPPONAX, of Ephesus, Greek iambic poet. Expelled from Ephesus in 540 B.C. by the tyrant Athenagoras, he took refuge in Clazomenae, where he spent the rest of his life in poverty. His deformed figure and malicious disposition exposed him to the caricature of the Chian sculptors Bupalus and Athenis, upon whom he revenged himself by issuing against them a series of satires. They are said to have hanged themselves like Lycambes and his daughters when assailed by Archilochus, the model and predecessor of Hipponax. His coarseness of thought and feeling, his rude vocabulary, his want of grace and taste, and his numerous allusions to matters of merely local interest prevented his becoming a favourite in Attica. He was considered the inventor of parody and of a peculiar metre, the _scazon_ or _choliambus_, which substitutes a spondee for the final iambus of an iambic senarius, and is an appropriate form for the burlesque character of his poems. Fragments in Bergk, _Poetae lyrici Graeci_; see also B. J. Peltzer, _De parodica Graecorum poesi_ (1855), containing an account of Hipponax and the fragments. HIPPOPOTAMUS ("river-horse," Gr. [Greek: hippos], horse and [Greek: potamos], river), the name of the largest representative of the non-ruminating artiodactyle ungulate mammals, and its living and extinct relatives. The common hippopotamus (_Hippopotamus amphibius_), which formerly inhabited all the great rivers of Africa but whose range has now been much restricted, is most likely the _behemoth_ of Scripture, and may very probably in Biblical times have been found in the Jordan valley, since at a still earlier (Pleistocene) epoch it ranged over a large part of Europe. It typifies not only a genus, but likewise a family, _Hippopotamidae_, distinguished from its relatives the pigs and peccaries, or _Suidae_, by the following assemblage of characters: Muzzle very broad and rounded. Feet short and broad, with four subequal toes, bearing short rounded hoofs, and all reaching the ground in walking. Incisors not rooted but continuously growing; those of the upper jaw curved and directed downwards; those of the lower straight and procumbent. Canines very large, curved, continuously growing; upper ones directed downwards. Premolars 4/4; molars 3/3. Stomach complex. No caecum. [Illustration: The Hippopotamus (_Hippopotamus amphibius_).]