Hipponax’s Iambic Persona and the Protean Art of Begging

This chapter offers a new reading of Hipponax’s prayers to Hermes and related fragments, arguing that they form part of a sustained poetic strategy centred on the persona of the beggar or petitioner. It first traces their reception in Aristophanes, showing that passages in the Acharnians, Wasps, and especially the Assemblywomen preserve and transform distinctive features of Hipponactean “begging poetry”. The Assemblywomen in particular helps illuminate the notoriously obscure request for “sixty staters on the other side” in fr. 32: the phrase is interpreted in connection with scales, exploiting the double meaning of stater as both coin and weight and turning Hermes, traditionally a divine weigher, into a merchant whom Hipponax attempts to outwit. The chapter then examines the comic associations of the chlaina and the poem’s sound effects, including onomatopoeic representations of shivering and chattering teeth. Finally, the recurrent verbal and thematic doublets preserved in the fragments are interpreted not as accidental repetitions but as deliberate variations within a coherent performative fiction. Hipponax thus emerges as a protean beggar-poet, repeatedly reformulating his requests across different registers, rhythms, and verbal textures, in a manner that has consequences for both the reconstruction and the editing of his poetry.