a celebrated Greek satirist, was a native of Ephesus; and flourished in the latter half of the sixth century B.C. He was an ardent lover of freedom, and wrote and spoke so boldly in its favour, that Comas and Athenagoras, the tyrants of Ephesus, expelled him from his birth-place. He took refuge in Clazomenae, where he lived and died in great poverty. Hipponax was one of the bitterest of all the Greek writers of satire, and in the classics the epithet "Pikros" is generally attached to his name. He found the subjects of his satire in the effeminacy and immorality of his countrymen, and in their superstitious idolatry. The faithlessness of women was also a favourite theme for his sarcasm; and in two of his remaining lines he says "a husband has two happy days in his life, one when he welcomes home his bride, and another when he follows her to the grave." Hipponax was in person little, and marvellously ugly, and the Chian sculptors Athenis and Bupalus amused themselves by exaggerating and caricaturing his ugliness. The enraged poet avenged himself by directing against them the most poisonous shafts in his quiver; and it is said, though the story is probably unfounded, that Bupalus, in shame and despair, committed suicide.

After the death of Hipponax it was suggested by Alcaeus of Messene that his tomb should be strewed with thorns and thistles, instead of roses and vine-leaves; and another epigrammatist warns the traveller against approaching it too closely, lest they rouse the wasp sleeping within. Of Hipponax's poems only about a hundred lines are extant. They have been preserved by Welcker in his *Hipponactis et Ananii iambographorum Fragmenta*, Göttingen, 1817, and have been published by other scholars of Welcker's day, such as Bergk and Meincke. They serve to show that the reports of his bitterness are not unfounded, but that he could relieve the severity of his satire by an abundant play of light and graceful fancy.

Hipponax introduced a curious change in the structure of the old iambic trimeter. In the last foot he substituted for the iambus a trochee or a spondee, giving the verse a lame or limping rhythm, from which it was called choliambus or iambus seazon. He also takes similar liberties with many others of the metres which he employs, and the innovation, though strange, is said to be well adapted to the general effect of the iambus, as it was moulded in the hands of Hipponax.

**HIPPOPOTAMUS.** See index to Mammalia.