Both in love and war he is uncompromisingly frank. He tells us how he threw away his shield ‘_beside the bush in battle: but deuce take the shield, I will get another just as good, and at any rate I have escaped from death_.’ His love poems are equally free-spoken. It is the actual image of his mistress that torments him when he cries, ‘_With myrtle boughs and roses fair she used to delight herself_’; and again, ‘_All her back and shoulders were covered by the shadow of her hair_.’ But to his fierce spirit such love brings little comfort: ‘_Wretch that I am, like a dead man I lie, captive to desire, pierced with cruel anguish through all my bones_’; and, ‘_The longing that takes the strength from a man’s limbs, it is that which overcomes me now_.’ Soon his love turns to hate and loathing, and he imputes to the woman the fault that is really his own: ‘_I was wronged, I have sinned. Aye! and many another man, methinks, will fall like me to ruin_.’ His mistress now for him has lost her beauty. _‘No longer does your soft flesh bloom fair; even as dry leaves it begins to wither.’_ Like all women, she is false and full of guile: ‘_In one hand she carries water, in the other the fire of craft_.’ To marry a woman now is, ‘_To take to one’s house manifest ruin_.’ The folly of men and the falsity of women seem to have been the themes of the animal stories which Archilochus, like Æsop, composed. Woman is the fox; man is now the eagle, now the ape; but the fragments are too short for a certain judgment. What remains, indeed, of Archilochus is always tantalising in its incompleteness. Of his epigrams, for example, only three are left; here is a free translation of one of them: ‘Miss High-and-mighty, as soon as she became a wedded wife, kicked her bonnet over the moon.’ Fortunately, however, we have preserved for us in Herodotus a much longer specimen of Archilochus’ manner—a real Milesian tale, the story of Gyges and Candaules. The tale is handed down to us in Herodotus’ prose, and it is impossible to disentangle the shares contributed by the Ionian poet and the Ionian historian; nor is it necessary; the story is typical of both. Candaules makes the initial mistake of being enamoured of his own wife, and the second mistake of not believing Gyges when he is enlightened on the subject of female modesty. His folly naturally brings him to a bad end. The story is interesting, but it is especially significant when we compare it with the tale of the same Gyges as told by Plato. There the sensual elements disappear, the interest centres in the magic ring, and the seduction of the queen and murder of the king form merely the hasty conclusion of the narrative. The difference between the two stories is the measure of the difference between the feminist philosopher and the libertine turned woman-hater.