Semonides, a Greek iambic poet, lived around 600BC. Although little of his work remains his sense of humour is revealed in the surviving pieces such as Some Women, a satirical account of the supposed different character types of women.

SEMONIDES, Greek iambic and elegiac poet, probably lived in the seventh and sixth centunes B.C. His birthplace was Samos, but his name is particularly associated with another island, Amorgos, on which he founded a Samian colony.

His longest surviving fragment consists of one hundred and eighteen lines of his Iambus on Women. Semonides offers compariSons of different sorts of women with various types of animals, in a coarsely unchivalrous manner that is reminiscent of the anti-feminism of Hesiod (eighth century B.C.) and shows the influence of the mutual vituperation of the sexes that was a coiiimon feature of folktales. From these lines Semonides emerges as a tough and unregenerate satirist, to whom rhetoric came naturally in an epoch when it had not yet been discovered as an art. The piece is also of considerable historical importance as the longest specimen of this type of early iambic satire that has come down to us; and its literary merit received new appreciation in recent studies. enter>

Another iambic fragment dwells on the illusions and uncertainties of life, and although Semonides declares that one must make the best of things, he says this in a tone not far removed from despair. A passage from an elegy contains similar ideas of the futility of human hopes, combined with a lame appeal to enjoy oneself all the same. Semonides was also said to have written two books of elegiacs on the history of Samos