Archilochus is the father of iambic poetry, and he made it the medium of expression of personal passion and satire. With all the ardor of his nature, he loved Neobule, daughter of Lycambes, of the island of Paros, where the poet had made his home. Certain fragments of his poems, still extant, indicate the intensity of the flame with which he was consumed. Archilochus has left us an exquisite picture of his loved one, clad in all the beauty and grace a poetic lover could portray, with a rose and a myrtle branch in her hand, and her tresses falling caressingly over her shoulders. He sighed "were it to touch but her hand," and she seems at first to have returned his affection. The lovers were betrothed, but suddenly the father objected, and the match was broken off. Love immediately turned into hate, and passion changed into rage. Thereupon, as Horace says: _"Archilochum proprio rabies armavit iambo,"_ Archilochus used the iambic metre as his weapon of attack. As his love had been ardent, so, when betrayed, his rage was uncontrollable. Every possible taunt was cast at those who had deceived him. "Each verse he wrote was polished and pointed like an arrow head. Each line was steeped in the poison of hideous charges against his sweetheart, her sister, and her father. The set of poems which he produced, and, as it would appear, recited publicly at the festival of Demeter, was so charged with wit and fire that the country rang with them. The daughters of Lycambes, tradition avers, went straightway and hanged themselves--unable to endure the flight of fiery serpents that had fallen upon them; for, to quote the words of Browning, Archilochus had the art of writing verse that 'bit into the live man's flesh like parchment,' that sent him wandering, branded and forever shamed, about his native fields and streets." Archilochus's verses indicate that, in the eighth century before our era, there was in Greece a certain freedom of intercourse between the sexes, and that love was, at times at least, the basis for betrothal; it also shows the absolute control of the father over the hand of his daughter. The poet's story is also the earliest we have of love betrayed, and the name of Neobule is inextricably intertwined with the rise of satiric verse. A different note is struck by Archilochus's contemporary, Semonides of Amorgus, who takes up and continues the tradition of Hesiod in speaking of woman in tones of contempt and disparagement. He composed a celebrated satire on woman, in which her various temperaments are ascribed to a kinship with different domestic animals,--the hog, the fox, the dog, the ass, the mare, the ape,--or are compared to mud, sea water, and the bee.