Iambus

Iambus, or iambic poetry, was a genre of ancient Greek poetry, not restricted to the iambic meter, whose origins scholars trace to the cults of Demeter and Dionysus. Marked by insulting and obscene language and sometimes called blame poetry, it was practiced by the Archaic poets Archilochus, Semonides and Hipponax, later imitated by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus and by Roman writers such as Catullus and Horace, whose Epodes mainly imitated Archilochus.