Iambus or
iambic poetry was a genre of
ancient Greek poetry that included but was not restricted to the
iambic meter and whose origins modern scholars have traced to the cults of
Demeter and
Dionysus. The genre featured insulting and obscene language and sometimes it is referred to as "blame poetry". For
Alexandrian editors, however, iambus signified any poetry of an informal kind that was intended to entertain, and it seems to have been performed on similar occasions as
elegy even though lacking elegy's decorum. The
Archaic Greek poets
Archilochus,
Semonides and
Hipponax were among the most famous of its early exponents. The
Alexandrian poet
Callimachus composed "iambic" poems against contemporary scholars, which were collected in an edition of about a thousand lines, of which fragments of thirteen poems survive. He in turn influenced Roman poets such as
Catullus, who composed satirical epigrams that popularized Hipponax's
choliamb.
Horace's
Epodes on the other hand were mainly imitations of Archilochus and, as with the Greek poet, his invectives took the forms both of private revenge and denunciation of social offenders.