The iambic metre, built upon the primitive iambus, or coarse and licentious jesting,[151] which formed a part of some Grecian festivals (especially of the festivals of Dêmêtêr as well in Attica as in Paros, the native country of the poet), is only one amongst many new paths struck out by his inventive genius; whose exuberance astonishes us, when we consider that he takes his start from little more than the simple hexameter,[152] in which, too, he was a distinguished composer,—for even of the elegiac verse he is as likely to have been the inventor as Kallinus, just as he was the earliest popular and successful composer of table-songs, or Skolia, though Terpander may have originated some such before him. The entire loss of his poems, excepting some few fragments, enables us to recognize little more than one characteristic,—the intense personality which pervaded them, as well as that coarse, direct, and out-spoken license, which afterwards lent such terrible effect to the old comedy at Athens. His lampoons are said to have driven Lykambês, the father of Neobulê, to hang himself: the latter had been promised to Archilochus in marriage, but that promise was broken, and the poet assailed both father and daughter with every species of calumny.[153] In addition to this disappointment, he was poor, the son of a slave-mother, and an exile from his country, Paros, to the unpromising colony of Thasos. The desultory notices respecting him betray a state of suffering combined with loose conduct which vented itself sometimes in complaint, sometimes in libellous assault; and he was at last slain by some whom his muse had thus exasperated. His extraordinary poetical genius finds but one voice of encomium throughout antiquity. His triumphal song to Hêraklês was still popularly sung by the victors at Olympia, near two centuries after his death, in the days of Pindar; but that majestic and complimentary poet at once denounces the malignity, and attests the retributive suffering, of the great Parian iambist.[154] [151] Homer, Hymn. ad Cererem. 202; Hesychius, v. Γεφυρὶς; Herodot. v, 83; Diodor. v, 4. There were various gods at whose festivals scurrility (τωθασμὸς) was a consecrated practice, seemingly different festivals in different places (Aristot. Politic. vii, 15, 8). The reader will understand better what this consecrated scurrility means by comparing the description of a modern traveller in the kingdom of Naples (Tour through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples, by Mr. Keppel Craven, London, 1821, ch. xv, p. 287):—