Pliny tells a rather amusing and interesting account of such an architect by the name of Bupalus, who probably flourished about the year 524 B.C. He is said to have come from a very old family of artists who exercised the art of the statuary from the beginning of the Olympiads; but as Pliny simply speaks of him as an architect and artist, but does not mention any building attributed to his skill, he becomes a subject for notice only in connection with the Iambic poet Hipponax, whom he used his art to torment. Pliny relates that Bupalus and his brother Athenis amused themselves by making caricatures of the satirical poet. Hipponax was undersized, thin and ugly, and probably, like the modern poet Pope, suffered his physical defects to give him a cynical view of life. The caricatures of the playful Bupalus and Athenis naturally affected unpleasantly his _amour propre_, and he employed the weapon at his command, his ironical pen, to strike back at his tormentors, with the result that he gave them a good pen lashing in a satirical poem, in which he also chastised his Ionian brethren for what he considered their effeminate luxury. In the same poem, also, he did not spare his own parents, and it is said that he even had the temerity to ridicule the gods. There is, of course, always some one to start the story that a woman is at the source of all the infirmities that any particularly conspicuous man suffers from, and there are those who claim that Bupalus did not originate the trouble, but that it started through the fact that the architect had a very beautiful daughter of whom Hipponax was greatly enamored. Like the earlier Iambic poet Archilochus, who got into a similar scrape, the girl’s father refused to permit his daughter to marry a poor little withered poet, with the result that the poet’s life was ever after embittered. How very bitter Hipponax became, especially against the ladies, is illustrated by a remark which is attributed to him: “There are,” he said, “only two happy days in the life of a married man—that in which he receives his wife, and that in which he carries out her corpse.” After his death Leonidas of Tarentum, in an elegant epigram, warned travellers not to pass too near his tomb, lest they rouse the sleeping wasp. The grave of Hipponax, by the way, instead of being covered with ivy and roses, like that of a mild poet, was planted with thorns and thistles.