a Greek poet of Ephesus, son of Pythes and Proti (Suid.), who seems to have flourished in the times of Croesus and Cyrus, n. c. 546 (Marm. Arund.), which agrees sufficiently with the statement of Pliny, that he lived about the sixtieth Olympiad (n. c. 540). He was thus about half a century subsequent to Archilocheus, to whose history that of Hipponax bears a strong resemblance. Hated by the tyrants of his country, Athenagoras and Comas, he was obliged to fly, and proceeded to take up his residence at Clazomenae, another city of Ionia, where, according to some, he died of hunger and want. In the history of poetry he is celebrated as the inventor of a species of iambic verse, which is called choliambi, because the line is imperfect. It is said that we are indebted for its invention to the circumstance of his dispute with two sculptors of Ephesus, Bupalus and Anthermus, who had exposed the poet to the ridicule of his countrymen by a hideous and grotesque representation of him. The poet took ample revenge on the sculptors by a lampoon of so cutting a character that they are said to have hanged themselves. (Plin. xxxvi. 5; Ælian. V. H. x. 6; Hor. Epod. vii. 11; Callimach. Fragm. xc.) The quality for which he was most distinguished was bitterness; and, in allusion to this, it is said that his grave was strewed with thorn bushes instead of vine branches and ivy. (Alceus Messen. Anthol. Palat. vii. 536.) Besides the choliambi, he wrote also poetry in regular iambic measure. Little of the poetry of Hipponax has been preserved; only a few lines quoted by scholiasts and grammarians have been transmitted to us, but these have been carefully collected by Welcher, Hippoactis et Ananii Lambrophorum Fragmenta, Göttingen, 1817.