Demodocus (; , ''Demodokos'') of

Leros Leros (), also called Lero (from the Italian language), is a Greek island and municipality in the Dodecanese in the southern Aegean Sea. It lies from Athens's port of Piraeus, from which it can be reached by a nine-hour ferry ride or by a 45-min ...

was an

ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

poet who is believed to have lived during the sixth century BC. on the small island of

in the

Aegean Sea The Aegean Sea is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea between Europe and Asia. It is located between the Balkans and Anatolia, and covers an area of some . In the north, the Aegean is connected to the Marmara Sea, which in turn con ...

. He composed in elegiacs and iambs and appears to have specialized in

gnomic poetry Gnomic poetry consists of meaningful sayings put into verse to aid the memory. They were known by the Greeks as gnomes (cf. the Greek adjective γνωμικός (''gnomikos'') "appertaining to an opinion or aphorism"). A ''gnome'' was defined by t ...

like his likely contemporary

Phocylides Phocylides (), Greek gnomic poet of Miletus, contemporary of Theognis of Megara, was born about 560 BC. A few fragments of his " maxims" have survived (chiefly in the ''Florilegium'' of Stobaeus), in which he expresses his contempt for the po ...

. Little of his poetry survives, preserved in brief quotations by other authors, but it is possible that, like those of Phocylides, many of his gnomic utterances opened with the tag "And Demodocus says ...," as in the following assessment of Milesians:

M.L. West Martin Litchfield West, (23 September 1937 – 13 July 2015) was a British philologist and classical scholar. In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, he was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2014. West wrote on ancient Greek music, ...

, who characterizes this couplet and similar fragments dealing with Demodocus' contemporary Lerians as "brilliant", notes that the poet's use of the elegiac couplet in poetry with an "epigrammatic air" is indicative of the meter's suitability for composing the pithy verse that would later become a hallmark of the classical

epigram An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word derives from the Greek (, "inscription", from [], "to write on, to inscribe"). This literary device has been practiced for over two millennia ...

References

Works cited

* . * . 6th-century BC Greek poets People from Leros Ancient Greek elegiac poets Ancient Greek iambic poets {{AncientGreece-writer-stub