To translate Archilochus is almost impossible. His merit is the perfection of style, which will admit of no transplantation. His language is the language of common life, exquisitely chosen, and kept within the most exact limits, with a view to the production of a carefully studied effect. It is hopeless to render such fragments as we possess without making them seem coarse or prosy, the poet's supremacy having been achieved by his artistic handling of vernacular Greek. When we compare its pithy terseness with the flowing grandeur of the epic--a grandeur which had already become conventional in Greece, a fluency which poetasters abused--it is easy to understand that the racy epigrams of Archilochus, in which the subject was set forth with exquisite point and without circumlocution, must have been an acceptable novelty to his audience. Greek sculpture is not more pure in outline than the following fragment,[73] which sets before our eyes the figure of a girl embossed on marble or engraved in chalcedony: #echousa thallon myrsinês eterpeto rhodês te kalon anthos, hê de hoi komê ômous kateskiaze kai metaphrena.# Archilochus flourished between 714 and 676 B.C. The date of the next iambic poet, Simonides of Amorgos, is 660 B.C. It is noticeable that both of these satirists are Ionian. The relaxation of Ionian life and the freedom of Ionian manners, as concerned the artist and the public, rendered the development of satire in Ionia more natural than it could ever have been in a Dorian state. Simonides owes his celebrity to a poem upon women, a very ungallant production of 119 lines, which presents one of the most curious examples upon record of a perfectly smooth and yet crushing satire. The iambic lines flow quietly and swiftly off the poet's lips, in mild and polished phraseology, with none of the concentrated fury of Archilochus. Yet Simonides aims at no less than destroying the character of a whole sex. In a sort of gentle, well-mannered, lazy way he is successful, not so much by persuading us through examples, after the method of Juvenal, that his satire is justified, as by the imperturbable expression of a profound conviction. The interest of this poem is very great, as marking a departure from the personalities of Archilochus and an attempt to introduce generalities into the region of satiric delineation. In this respect it is in Greek literature almost unique, if we except Sicilian, Megarian, and Attic comedy, whereof this is not the place to speak. The rhetorical treatment of a problem of social ethics from the point of view of satire was, as we shall see hereafter, alien to Greek literature.