Demodocus (; grc-gre, Δημόδoκος, ''Demodokos'') of

Leros Leros ( el, Λέρος) is a Greek island and municipality in the Dodecanese in the southern Aegean Sea. It lies (171 nautical miles) from Athens's port of Piraeus, from which it can be reached by an 9-hour ferry ride or by a 45-minute flight fr ...

was an

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

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

in the

Aegean sea The Aegean Sea ; tr, Ege Denizi (Greek language, Greek: Αιγαίο Πέλαγος: "Egéo Pélagos", Turkish language, Turkish: "Ege Denizi" or "Adalar Denizi") is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea between Europe and Asia. It ...

. He composed in

elegiacs The adjective ''elegiac'' has two possible meanings. First, it can refer to something of, relating to, or involving, an elegy or something that expresses similar mournfulness or sorrow. Second, it can refer more specifically to poetry composed in ...

and iambs and appears to have specialized in

gnomic poetry : ''For the map projection see Gnomonic projection; for the game, see Nomic; for the mythological being, see Gnome.'' Gnomic poetry consists of meaningful sayings put into verse to aid the memory. They were known by the Greeks as gnomes (c.f. the ...

like his likely contemporary

Phocylides Phocylides ( el, Φωκυλίδης ὁ Μιλήσιος), 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 ...

. 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, 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, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word is derived from the Greek "inscription" from "to write on, to inscribe", and the literary device has been employed for over two mille ...

References

Works cited

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