The lyrical poet Ibykos was one of the most popular poets of his kind in ancient Greece. The lyric poets came after the homeric tradition, and before dramma, and present a move towards more humanistic themes, and also man's relation to nature, or sensual themes.
Although Ibykos had died most probably in a very different way, there is a very interesting folk tale about his death.
According to it Ibykos was once travelling το Klazomenai, an important city state in Ionia, and had to pass a wilderness to get through it. Almost immediately after he got to a distance from any other city he started to be followed by two strangers. He sensed that they possibly meant to rob him, so he started walking faster, however he did not manage to escape them and so when the night came they indeed attacked him, killed him and robbed him. At that time a flock of cranes flew above them.
The two thieves arrived in Klazomenai the following morning, with their loot, and went to the market to exchange some of it. One of them was very enthousiastic about their success to kill and rob the stranger in the wilderness, and so he kept laughing heartily, and looking at the merchants with glowing eyes, making refferences to his friend of the incident, in a way which could not give anyone of the merchants any definite clue of what had happened. Then, above the market, again there flew the same flock of cranes, and upon seing them the thief raised his hand to the sky and said to his friend: "Behold; the witnesses of Ibykos!". However news that someone had been killed and abandoned in the wilderness had already started to reach the city, and that quote later on led the people to realise that those two must have been the murderers, so they were caught and hanged.
This story always seemed to me to be very poetic. The flock of cranes, not being able to communicate anything to anyone by itself, had almost directly led to the punishment of the thieves, as if it was travelling from town to town only so as to serve as a memory of the uglyness which had happened
(the painting is "Le parisien", a minoan drawing, named as such since the diggers thought it looked like it was wearing a lot of make-up )
Although Ibykos had died most probably in a very different way, there is a very interesting folk tale about his death.
According to it Ibykos was once travelling το Klazomenai, an important city state in Ionia, and had to pass a wilderness to get through it. Almost immediately after he got to a distance from any other city he started to be followed by two strangers. He sensed that they possibly meant to rob him, so he started walking faster, however he did not manage to escape them and so when the night came they indeed attacked him, killed him and robbed him. At that time a flock of cranes flew above them.
The two thieves arrived in Klazomenai the following morning, with their loot, and went to the market to exchange some of it. One of them was very enthousiastic about their success to kill and rob the stranger in the wilderness, and so he kept laughing heartily, and looking at the merchants with glowing eyes, making refferences to his friend of the incident, in a way which could not give anyone of the merchants any definite clue of what had happened. Then, above the market, again there flew the same flock of cranes, and upon seing them the thief raised his hand to the sky and said to his friend: "Behold; the witnesses of Ibykos!". However news that someone had been killed and abandoned in the wilderness had already started to reach the city, and that quote later on led the people to realise that those two must have been the murderers, so they were caught and hanged.
This story always seemed to me to be very poetic. The flock of cranes, not being able to communicate anything to anyone by itself, had almost directly led to the punishment of the thieves, as if it was travelling from town to town only so as to serve as a memory of the uglyness which had happened
(the painting is "Le parisien", a minoan drawing, named as such since the diggers thought it looked like it was wearing a lot of make-up
)
