Bupalus and the Poet
Chios in the sixth century was also home to a dynasty of marble sculptors, and their story ends in one of the better literary feuds of antiquity.
The family runs, so far as inscriptions and Pliny allow us to reconstruct it, through four or five generations: Melas, then his son Micciades, then Micciades' son Archermus, then Archermus's sons Bupalus and Athenis. Four generations of one household working in stone on an island whose marble sculpture was among the most admired in the Aegean, at exactly the period when Greek sculpture was learning to do everything it would spend the next two centuries perfecting.
Archermus is credited with a specific innovation of enormous consequence. He was said to be the first to represent Nike, Victory, and Eros as winged. That is not a small thing. Winged Victory becomes one of the permanent images of Western art — she is on the prow at Samothrace, on Roman triumphal arches, on Napoleonic monuments, on war memorials in every country in Europe, and on the badge of Rolls-Royce. That the idea of giving her wings was attributed by the ancients to a sculptor from Chios is a striking claim, and it has some archaeological support: a statue base found on Delos in the nineteenth century carries an inscription naming Micciades and Archermus of Chios, and a winged female figure recovered nearby was long identified as their work. The identification is now doubted. The inscription is not, and it puts the family on the greatest sanctuary island of the Ionian world.
Their sons, Bupalus and Athenis, took the business international, working across the Ionian cities. And in one of those cities they made an enemy who could not be handled.
Hipponax of Ephesus was a poet of the mid-sixth century, the inventor of the limping iambic metre called the choliambic or scazon — a line that trips deliberately at the end, like a man with one leg shorter than the other — and the most savagely abusive author whose work survives from archaic Greece. What remains of him is fragments, and the fragments are a catalogue of beggary, hunger, thievery, obscenity, brawling, and low life, delivered in a voice of extraordinary and unrepentant coarseness. He was the ancestor of a whole tradition of invective poetry, and later poets who wanted to be nasty imitated him for a thousand years.
He was also, by all accounts, remarkably ugly.
The story, as antiquity told it, is this. Bupalus and Athenis made a portrait of Hipponax — a caricature, exaggerating his ugliness — and exhibited it publicly for laughs. Hipponax replied in verse. The campaign of abuse he mounted against the two brothers was so sustained and so annihilating that they could not appear in public, could not bear it, and hanged themselves.
Pliny the Elder, recording this, flatly refuses to believe it, and gives his reasons: Bupalus and Athenis went on producing statues for years afterwards, in a considerable number of cities, and were manifestly still alive. He is plainly right. The tale has nevertheless been retold continuously for twenty-five centuries, because it is a good story and because it encodes something the Greeks genuinely believed — that verse could kill, that a curse in metre had physical force, and that the man who could shape words was more dangerous than the man who could shape marble.
What we can take from it as history is smaller but real. Chian sculptors of the sixth century were prominent enough, and well known enough across the Ionian world, that a famous poet's quarrel with them was worth remembering. That is a working definition of an artistic centre.
Chios's literary output over the following two centuries is out of all proportion to its size. Beside Ion, whom we have already met at dinner with Sophocles, the island produced Theopompus, the great and famously acidic fourth-century historian, author of a Philippica in fifty-eight books whose surviving fragments show a moralist of exceptional ferocity, prepared to attack anyone; Theocritus of Chios, an orator whose wit was celebrated and who was executed for having deployed it against the Macedonians once too often; Scymnus, a geographer; and Metrodorus of Chios, an atomist philosopher whose scepticism was so radical that he opened his book with the sentence: None of us knows anything, not even this — whether we know or do not know.