Archilochus 1, 2, 5

Archilochus 1, 2, 5.

Archilochus 1: I am a servant of Ares and understand the love gift of the Muses.

Archilochus 2: my barley-cake and wine are in my spear; I drink it, leaning on my spear

Archilochus 5: Some Saian revels in my shield, which I abandoned; why do I care? I'll get another. 

1) Hard to imagine the poems these fragments came from. I've read them so many times independently, they feel like they stand alone in my head.

2) Μουσέων ἐρατὸν δῶρον ἐπιστάμενος is pretty interesting. ἐρατὸν δῶρον is a Homeric phrase, found at Il. 3.64 (μή μοι δῶρ᾽ ἐρατὰ πρόφερε χρυσέης Ἀφροδίτης), where ἐρατὀς is a Homeric hapax. At that Iliad bit Hector unfavorably links Aphrodite's gifts with the kithara, but the two appear to be separate for him (3.54: οὐκ ἄν τοι χραίσμῃ κίθαρις τά τε δῶρ᾽ Ἀφροδίτης). Fun to see this Archilochus passage as a direct Homeric allusion, given the unusual phrase; but with a spin seeing the gifts as positive (as Paris implores Hector). Maybe Archilochus properly understands what this gift is, in a way Hector and Paris didn't.

The phrase also seems to imply that we're talking here about love poetry specifically, depending how much you want to read into ἐρατὸν

3) I've always read "why do I care?" (τί μοι μέλει ἀσπὶς ἐκείνη;) as a kind of defiant opposition to societal norms, but I wonder if Archilochus/the narrator is more sensitive to those norms than he lets on -- "why do I care" but in sense more like "I really do care, but why I do care?" A bit like a lovesick Latin elegist consoling himself for the absence of his beloved.