HIPPONAX, of Ephesus, a poet placed third, after Archilochus and Simonides, among the classic iambic poets of Greece. Expelled from Ephesus in 540 b.c. by the tyrants Athenagoras and Comas, he took refuge in Clazomenae. There his deformed figure and malicious disposition exposed him to the caricature of the Chian sculptors Bupalus and Athenis; and he revenged himself by issuing against them a series of satires. These, though keen and bitter, are in thought and execution much inferior to the similar works of his predecessor Archilochus. His coarseness of thought and feeling, his rude vocabulary, his want of grace and taste, and his numerous allusions to matters of merely local interest prevented his becoming a favourite in Attica. He invented epic parody, and the four opening lines of a parody on the Iliad have been preserved in Athenaeus (xv. 698 B). He was also the inventor of a peculiar metre, used after him by many writers, called the scazon or choliambus, which substitutes a spondee for the final iambus of an iambic senarius. His works, which were annotated by Hermippus of Smyrna, were at an early date mingled and confused with those of Ananius, for whom some even claim the invention of the choliambus.