CHAPTER 22
Richard Rawles
Introduction
As usual with poets of the archaic and early classical period, secure facts about Simonides’ life are hard to find. He was from the little island of Ceos in the Aegean. Ancient tradition generally held that he was a generation older than Pindar and Bacchylides, both of whose working lives started early in the fifth century; some sources say that he was Bacchylides’ uncle (this may well be true—but since they both came from the same island it would also have been a likely fiction). Most poems lack datable references, but suggest that he flourished in the early fifth century. Ancient birth dates are unreliable and inconsistent: we hear of 556 and 532 (the former is better supported from the dubious ancient testimonies, but there is no good reason to accept either with much confidence).1 He was known for being long-lived.
Our knowledge of his works is fragmentary and difficult—but it is also growing, as we shall see. Epigrams are the only poems which are certainly complete (but they have their own problems of attribution: ancient sources sometimes said that epigrams were by Simonides incorrectly and on the basis of little evidence). Otherwise, complete poems were not transmitted through the middle ages in their own manuscripts as (for example) the epinician songs of Pindar were. Rather we have fragments, and these are of two kinds. Until the twentieth century, there were only quotation fragments: places where an author whose work has survived quotes from Simonides (see Phillips (Chapter 8) in this volume). Thus, as we shall see, substantial fragments are quoted by Plato and by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (a later author on history and rhetoric); however, most quotation fragments are smaller than this, and even these two biggest leave many questions open which we might reasonably expect to be able to answer from a complete text. More recently, however, our knowledge of Simonides’ poetry has expanded as a result of the publication of papyri, mostly from Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, written when that territory was a Roman colony with a Greek-speaking elite population (see Sampson (Chapter 7) in this volume). In 1959 many melic fragments were published, mostly appearing to come from epinicians and paeans, and mostly quite small. More small fragments from another papyrus came in 1967. The most dramatic expansion of the corpus, however, came in 1992, with the publication of a papyrus with several elegiac fragments, recognizable as Simonides (because there are overlaps with quotations, in Plutarch and in the late antique anthologist Stobaeus), and overlapping with a previously anonymous papyrus published earlier and thus showing that it was also a witness to Simonides’ elegies.
As is already apparent, we can see considerable generic variety in Simonides’ output. He composed in a variety of melic genres, including dithyramb, paean, epinician, and threnos (“dirge”): in this respect he resembles his contemporaries, Pindar and Bacchylides. Unlike these, however, Simonides is also a poet of elegy: a very different form with a different history, not usually combined with the tradition of choral lyric (see Bartol (Chapter 15) in this volume). This generic variation brings dialect variation with it, in another first: Simonides’ dialect switches between a form of literary Doric for melic poems, while he can “code-switch” to a predominantly Ionic dialect for elegy (see de Kreij (Chapter 10) in this volume). This will probably have given a stronger sense of variety and plurality of voices and genres in his output than was true of most contemporaries (but in tragedy we find a similar dialect contrast between spoken and sung parts).
Language and Pathos : Tragic Simonides
Our two biggest melic fragments are both of uncertain genre and reveal little of their original context. The first is quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a historian and literary critic of the first century BC. He quotes these lines written out as prose in order to illustrate that the reader cannot simply by reading perceive the metrical divisions of melic poetry. Appropriately, therefore, modern scholars have disagreed on how to divide this into lines and stanzas; this is the division used by Page (543 PMG; it is fr. 271 in Poltera’s edition), but with some minor textual differences.
ὅτε λάρνακι
ἐν δαιδαλέαι
ἄνεμός τέ μιν πνέων
κινηθεῖσά τε λίμνα δείματι
ἔρειπεν, οὐκ ἀδιάντοισι παρειαῖς 5
ἀμφί τε Περσέι βάλλε φίλαν χέρα
εἶπέν τ᾿· ὦ τέκος, οἷον ἔχω πόνον·
σὺ δ᾿ ἀωτεῖς, γαλαθηνωι
δ᾿ ἤτορι κνοώσσεις
ἐν ἀτερπέι δούρατι χαλκεογόμφωι 10
νυκτί <τ᾿ ἀ> λαμπέι
κυανέωι τε δνόφωι σταλείς·
ἄχναν δ᾿ ὕπερθε τεᾶν κομᾶν
βαθεῖαν παριόντος
κύματος οὐκ ἀλέγεις, οὐδ᾿ ἀνέμου 15
φθόγγον, πορφυρέαι
κείμενος ἐν χλανίδι, πρόσωπον καλόν.
εἰ δέ τοι δεινὸν τό γε δεινὸν ἦν,
καί κεν ἐμῶν ῥημάτων
20. λεπτὸν ὑπεῖχες οὖας. 20
κέλομαι <δ᾿>, εὗδε βρέφος,
εὑδέτω δὲ πόντος, εὑδέτω <δ᾿> ἄμετρον κακόν·
μεταβουλία δέ τις φανείη,
Ζεῦ πάτερ, ἐκ σέο·
25. ὅττι δὲ θαρσαλέον ἔπος εὔχομαι 25
ἢ νόσφι δίκας,
σύγγνωθί μοι.
… when (?), in an elaborately wrought chest, the wind blowing and the motion of the deep brought her down with terror, and with cheeks not unwetted she cast her loving arm around Perseus and spoke: “Oh, my child, what suffering is mine! But you sleep, with babyish heart you slumber in this joyless, bronze-bolted craft, sent out in the dark gloom of this lampless night. You care not for the deep spray of the wave passing above your head, nor for the crash of the wind, lying in your purple shawl—pretty face! If the terrible were terrible to you, then you would lend your delicate ear to my words. I bid you, sleep, baby! let the sea sleep! let my measureless sorrow sleep! And, father Zeus, let some change of plan appear from you; but if I pray a bold word, or contrary to right, forgive me!”
We start in medias res. The reader can supply some context from knowledge of the myth we are dealing with, though we do not know how much of this was told in the song from which we have this fragment. Danae’s father, Acrisios, received a prophecy that he would be killed by his grandson; accordingly, he imprisoned his daughter (in a dungeon, or perhaps a tower), but Zeus managed to impregnate Danae anyway, in the form of a shower of gold. Acrisius threw daughter and grandson into the sea in a chest (this is where our scene comes), and they drifted to the island of Seriphos and survived for Perseus to become the hero who kills Medusa.
We cannot see how much of the story of Danae and Perseus was told, nor over how many lines, nor whether, as in epinicians, the myth was enclosed in a substantial “frame” section dealing with contemporary matters, or whether as sometimes in songs transmitted as dithyrambs (e.g., Bacchylides 17) it consisted of mythical narrative from the start. Despite the substantial length of the fragment, Dionysius has filleted it very successfully so that no trace of “context” (whether narrative or occasional) remains, and therefore the common strategies of reading myth against frame and song against occasion are impossible. On the other hand (Bacchylides 17 again springs to mind as an analogy), we have enough to see a wonderful feat of narrative and characterization in this fragment (it is often read against the ancient tradition that Simonides was particularly skilled in the depiction of pathos).2 There is a sense of psychological penetration in the way in which Danae explores her situation through contrasting her fear with the lack of fear exhibited by Perseus, whose babyish lack of awareness of the situation prefigures his adult heroism. There is repeated play on the contrast between the royal status of Danae and her son and their present situation: she has been cast into the sea in a box, but the box is “elaborately wrought” and a “coffer”: λάρναξ, (“coffer”) is a rather poetic word, though it may be found in prose with the sense “coffin” (Thuc. 2.34) or describing the chests containing royal treasure (or appearing to: Hdt. 3.123). The baby’s shawl is a χλανίς, a kind of cloak or mantle which could be worn by a man or a woman, probably with connotations of luxury, and it is dyed purple, the most luxurious color of antiquity.
Some features of Danae’s speech are simple and prosaic, even naive: ὦ τέκος, οἷον ἔχω πόνον “Oh, my child, what suffering is mine!,” her address to the baby πρόσωπον καλόν “pretty face!” Yet she speaks the language of poetry and other sentences are much more complex. Her speech involves quite a bit of conceptual repetition with variation of vocabulary (ἀωτεῖς… κνοώσσεις… “you sleep… you slumber…”; the concentration of terms indicating “darkness” in 11–12, where the text is uncertain), and this makes straightforward repetition later in the speech more powerful (δεινὸν… δεινόν… “terrible… terrible”; εὗδε… εὑδέτω… εὑδέτω “sleep… sleep… sleep”). She cycles through different ways of speaking without a present interlocutor: first addressing the baby as if it could understand, even though he is both a baby and asleep (and this, of course, is psychologically realistic: mothers do talk to babies as if they could understand), then changing to a lullaby, then to a prayer.3 Indeed, the fragment seems to thematize different kinds of communication and the difficulty of imagining “other minds.” Danae cannot communicate with Perseus through speech, and this impossibility is over-determined: he is a baby and incapable of speech, he is asleep, he does not share her emotional response to the situation.
Basic concepts which feel obvious to Danae must be acknowledged as subjective: εἰ δέ τοι δεινὸν τό γε δεινὸν ἦν “if the terrible were terrible to you.” The situation is reminiscent of the moment where we see Hector and Andromache confronted by the perception of a baby in Iliad 6.466–6.473, at the point where Hector responds to Andromache’s pleas for caution by reaffirming his commitment to heroic violence:
ὣς εἰπὼν οὗ παιδὸς ὀρέξατο φαίδιμος Ἕκτωρ·
ἂψ δ᾽ ὃ πάϊς πρὸς κόλπον ἐϋζώνοιο τιθήνης
ἐκλίνθη ἰάχων πατρὸς φίλου ὄψιν ἀτυχθεὶς
ταρβήσας χαλκόν τε ἰδὲ λόφον ἱππιοχαίτην,
δεινὸν ἀπ᾽ ἀκροτάτης κόρυθος νεύοντα νοήσας.
ἐκ δ᾽ ἐγέλασσε πατήρ τε φίλος καὶ πότνια μήτηρ·
αὐτίκ᾽ ἀπὸ κρατὸς κόρυθ᾽ εἵλετο φαίδιμος Ἕκτωρ,
καὶ τὴν μὲν κατέθηκεν ἐπὶ χθονὶ παμφανόωσαν
With these words shining Hector reached out for his son,
but immediately the child leant back to the breast of his fine-girdled nurse,
screaming, terrified at the sight of his dear father
and frightened to see the bronze and the horse-hair crest
when he perceived it nodding terribly from the peak of the helmet.
And his dear father and his lady mother laughed out loud;
and immediately shining Hector took the helmet from his head
and placed the radiant helm upon the ground.
In both places we see a parent or parents looking upon a child whose perception of what is δεινόν (terrible, strange, frightening) differs fundamentally from theirs, Perseus because he does not seem scared of his and his mother’s situation, and Astyanax because he does not recognize the loving figure of his father beneath his martial plumed helmet. In both places the parent(s) are convinced of the commonsensical nature of their own definition of what is frightening (Hector and Andromache are moved to laughter by the gap between their perception and the baby’s); in both places the reader may feel that the child’s perspective is not without a kind of wisdom. Astyanax is afraid of the warlike helmet, which we naturally understand as representing Hector’s identity as a warrior and his commitment to the world of fighting and of competition for glory (the helmet, like Hector, is shiny: glory is often figured as radiance of light in Greek). This commitment, as Andromache fears and the audience knows, will lead to his death, and when Troy has lost its best defender the city will fall, and Astyanax will be brutally murdered (this scene comes immediately after the dialogue in which Hector and Andromache as a couple most directly confront their fears about what will happen to them in the event of the sack of the city). In the case of Perseus, we may wonder whether he sleeps and neglects to fear the storm because he somehow knows that he is under his divine father’s protection: in this case, our lack of understanding about the “knowledge” of the characters and therefore about the degree of irony involved maps on to our lack of context for the fragment. We do not know whether, in addressing Zeus (as “father”), Danae realizes that the god is her former lover (or rapist) and the father of her child, though the ostentatious diffidence of her prayer leads me to imagine that she does not. In both cases, it is a wise child who knows his own father—and who understands that knowledge, and how it relates to the question of what to fear.
The fragment seems to combine sensitive awareness of irony and of the fragility of the connection between human (or divine) minds that speech can provide which, especially when combined with pathos and an emphasis on female experience, would not be out of place in tragedy.4
Praise and Tension
The other of the two biggest melic fragments is puzzling and difficult too, albeit for very different reasons. Here we are again dealing with a quotation fragment (strictly speaking, a sequence of quotation fragments put into order by editors).5 They are quoted in Plato’s Protagoras, where that sophist quotes them as being about ἀρετή (arete, usually translated “virtue”), and mentions in passing that they were addressed to Scopas, son of Creon of Thessaly. The same Scopas is regularly a patron of Simonides in anecdotal tradition (the most famous of these stories is discussed below). Protagoras and Socrates discuss this poem, adducing quotations as they go, and interpreting it in way which Plato must have meant, if not quite as parody, then as an ironized or tongue-in-cheek version of literary interpretation. The usual way in which editors put these quotations together is as follows (542 PMG = 260 Poltera):
ἄνδρ᾿ ἀγαθὸν μὲν ἀλαθέως γενέσθαι
χαλεπὸν χερσίν τε καὶ ποσὶ καὶ νόωι
τετράγωνον ἄνευ ψόγου τετυγμένον·
[missing verses: probably seven]
οὐδέ μοι ἐμμελέως τὸ Πιττάκειον
νέμεται, καίτοι σοφοῦ παρὰ φωτὸς εἰ–
ρημένον· χαλεπὸν φάτ᾿ ἐσθλὸν ἔμμεναι.
θεὸς ἂν μόνος τοῦτ᾿ ἔχοι γέρας, ἄνδρα δ᾿ οὐκ
ἔστι μὴ οὐ κακὸν ἔμμεναι, 15
ὃν ἀμήχανος συμφορὰ καθέληι·
πράξας γὰρ εὖ πᾶς ἀνὴρ ἀγαθός,
κακὸς δ᾿ εἰ κακῶς [
[ἐπὶ πλεῖστον δὲ καὶ ἄριστοί εἰσιν
οὓς ἂν οἱ θεοὶ φιλῶσιν.] 20
τοὔνεκεν οὔ ποτ᾿ ἐγὼ τὸ μὴ γενέσθαι
δυνατὸν διζήμενος κενεὰν ἐς ἄ—
πρακτον ἐλπίδα μοῖραν αἰῶνος βαλέω,
πανάμωμον ἄνθρωπον, εὐρυεδέος ὅσοι
καρπὸν αἰνύμεθα χθονός· 25
ἐπὶ δ᾿ ὑμὶν εὑρὼν ἀπαγγελέω.
πάντας δ᾿ ἐπαίνημι καὶ φιλέω,
ἑκὼν ὅστις ἔρδηι
μηδὲν αἰσχρόν· ἀνάγκαι
δ᾿ οὐδὲ θεοὶ μάχονται. 30
[
[
[οὐκ εἰμὶ φιλόψογος, ἐπεὶ ἔμοιγε ἐξαρκεῖ
ὃς ἂν μὴ κακὸς ἦι] μηδ᾿ ἄγαν ἀπάλαμνος εἰ–
δώς γ᾿ ὀνησίπολιν δίκαν, 35
ὑγιὴς ἀνήρ· οὐδὲ μή μιν ἐγὼ
μωμήσομαι· τῶν γὰρ ἠλιθίων
ἀπείρων γενέθλα.
πάντα τοι καλά, τοῖσίν
τ᾿ αἰσχρὰ μὴ μέμεικται. 40
It is difficult for a man to be truly good,
in hands and feet and thought,
built four-square without a fault.
[missing verses: probably seven]
Nor, in my view, is the saying of Pittacus considered
harmonically, though spoken by a wise man:
he said it was difficult to be noble.
Only a god might have this prize; for a man
it is impossible that he not become bad,
whenever helpless disaster seizes him.
After succeeding, every man is good,
but he is bad if he [does] badly.
[For the most part they are the best
whomsoever the gods love.]
For this reason, I shall never, in quest
of the impossible, throw away my lifetime
on an empty, unachievable hope:
a wholly blameless man, among us
who reap the fruit of the broad earth.
If I find one, I shall tell you!
But I praise and love everybody,
whoever does nothing shameful
willingly; with necessity
not even the gods fight.
[…]
[…]
[I am no blame-lover, since it is enough for me
who ever is not bad] nor too reckless, and knows
the justice that benefits the city,
a sound man. I shall find no fault
with him. For the race of fools
is endless.
All, I say, is fair, with which
the shameful is not mixed.
Pittacus was a “sage”: a wisdom figure from the past (he was tyrant of Mytilene on Lesbos around the end of the seventh century BC). This kind of self-positioning in poetry against such wisdom-figures (they were—probably later—conceptualized as a group of “Seven Sages”) seems to be characteristic of Simonides. His bluntly presented disagreements with them serve to increase the extent to which his own voice is presented as a moral authority for us to grapple with.6
The problem addressed by Protagoras and Socrates in the dialogue is one which has also preoccupied modern scholars: is there a contradiction between the narrator’s initial claim that “it is difficult for a man to be truly good (ἀγαθός, agathos)” and his rejection of Pittacus’ dictum that “it is difficult to be noble (ἐσθλός, esthlos).” Some have suggested a differentiation between the two different adjectives used, but the difference between the Greek words is less than between my translations “good” and “noble”: both Greek words can refer both to status and to moral qualities, and in the same stanza as the quotation of Pittacus’ words agathos seems to be used as a synonym of esthlos. The verb translated as “to be” is different in each case: first γενέσθαι (genesthai) then ἔμμεναι (emmenai). Of these, the first may be “become” as well as “be,” and in Plato’s dialogue Socrates tries to maintain that in Simonides’ poem this is a significant distinction. But again, this is hard to maintain (and very often in Greek these verbs are straight synonyms). One of the more successful attempts in modern scholarship has been to try to argue that, while the same adjective χαλεπός is used in each statement, it is first used in the sense “impossible” but then in the sense “difficult.”7 By this reading, Simonides’ argument is “It is impossible to be truly, utterly good without any qualification whatsoever […]. When Pittacus said it was difficult to be good, he was understating the case: in fact, total goodness is impossible for mortals.” An alternative approach might be to suggest that the narrator enacts the arrival at a greater understanding of goodness and mortality in the course of the (missing) remains of the first stanza: “To be a good man is hard… no, now I come to realize that this saying of Pittacus is wrong: it is not hard, but impossible.”
In any case, the song seems to problematize not only goodness but the vocabulary of goodness: is being the same as becoming? is esthlos the same as agathos? are there true synonyms in the ethical vocabulary of Simonides’ time? In this respect, we may see a connection with the reflections on communication and meaning in Danae’s speech: “if the terrible were terrible to you…” One may also think of a tension between goodness as a marker of achievement (and thus impossible for somebody who cannot achieve perfect success, as a god might) and goodness as an inner quality of the community-spirited man of good will: not philosophically innovative on Simonides’ part (similar reflections on the question “what does it mean to be agathos/esthlos?” are characteristic for example of the elegies of Theognis), but sharply focused through the apparent contradictions between contrasting sections of the song.8
As we have seen, a major difference between this song and the Danae fragment is that we have no information at all about the context of the latter. In this case, we do have the information, provided by Plato’s Protagoras (but subsequently ignored by the participants in the dialogue), that this song was addressed to Scopas of Thessaly. It seems likely, therefore (but not certain) that he was named in the song (probably in the missing part of the first stanza) and that this was how Plato and his characters knew this. Can this help us? Why would Simonides address his reflections on the difficulty of goodness to a Thessalian dynast; or, to put it the other way about, why would his song for a Thessalian nobleman be so much dominated by ethical reflections of this kind? The most successful attempts to approach this song with a view to this contextual information have been to align it with the rhetoric of praise poetry.9 Thus we may notice that in the third line the good man is also the one who is “without blame”; that again at line 24 the man whom Simonides declines to seek is “wholly blameless”; that at 27 the narrator describes the man whom “I praise and love”; that in 33 (paraphrase in Plato’s prose) he is “no blame-lover”; and again that in 37 he rejects blame of the man who acts well by supporting justice in the city. Reflection on the relationship between praise and blame is commonplace in the praise poetry of the archaic and classical period: poets are sensitive to the notion that achievement will bring envy and spite as well as praise. Thus, most famously, in Pindar’s Pythian 2 praise of Hieron for his victory in the games is paired with rejection of blame and of the iambic poet Archilochus, the archetypal poet of blame (Pindar Pythian 2.52–2.56, 72–96).10
By this kind of reading, then, the song praises Scopas, while acknowledging that neither he nor any other mortal is so good that he is invulnerable to blame. Perhaps in the missing lines Scopas was said to have got as close to full “goodness” as any mortal could. This kind of “normalization” as praise should not be taken too far, however: at least as fragmented by Plato, this is still a deeply strange song, in which it appears that praise has been almost drowned by rather ambivalent ethical reflection about praise and goodness. It may feel hard to imagine that Scopas would have been pleased to be praised in this way: the stress on the impossibility of true goodness feels like an apology for half-heartedly praising a morally compromised man more than the words of a speaker taking delight in praising a worthy patron. Perhaps the reflective and morally thoughtful quality of the speaking voice was rhetorically successful by establishing the narrator’s moral authority in praising Scopas, even if this effect was rather tensely achieved by frankly acknowledging moral difficulty in praise rather than praising with the appearance of cheerful enthusiasm. In any case, as we shall see, this is not the only Simonidean praise fragment which was marked by an odd degree of tension.
Probably most of Simonides’ poems of praise were epinicians: songs commemorating victories at the athletic competitions (such as the Olympic games) which were in his time a key venue for competition among elite males. Later sources show us that his epinicians were gathered in several books, arranged by type of event (rather than, as with Pindar, by festival at which the victory was won).11 He may have been the first canonical poet to compose songs which should be classified as epinician, but some see traces of epinician already in Ibycus.12 However, of his substantial output in this genre very little survives and what we have is mostly in rather small fragments, whether from quotation or papyrus. Some of these, however, are at least suggestive. For us it is impossible to avoid comparison with the complete epinician songs of Pindar and Bacchylides (since they are complete, though for Bacchylides only in some cases); however, the flavor of Simonidean epinician can seem very different.13 Pindar’s epinician odes are characterized by lack of interest in the events of the competitions themselves: exciting narratives are from the world of myth, not from any “sports writing” describing the race or competition. This is a stronger element in Bacchylides, and some brief fragments of Simonides focusing on exciting parts of the contest suggest that the same was true of his work.14
This fragment is from an epinician for a boxer, Glaucus of Carystus (509 PMG = 18 Poltera: the detail of expression is suspect, since this is Page’s tentative reconstruction of a poetic phrase from the paraphrase in prose by Lucian):
οὐδὲ Πολυδεύκεος βία
χεῖρας ἀντείναιτό κ᾽ ἐναντίον αὐτῶι
οὐδὲ σιδάρεον Ἀλκμάνας τέκος.
Not even mighty Polydeuces
would raise his hands against him,
nor the iron son of Alcmene!
In longer epinician songs by Pindar or Bacchylides there is generally a mythical narrative, and part of the listener’s task is to identify connections (analogies and contrasts) between the heroes of myth and the laudandus of the poem; the explicit and potentially shocking claim here, that the victorious boxer (perhaps a boy?15) would be too strong for Polydeuces or Heracles must be jocular in its exaggeration.
As we shall see, reception of Simonides often focuses on tensions in the relationship between poet and patron; the strangeness of a song such as the encomium of Scopas just discussed is one feature of the surviving fragments which might account for this. Another place may be found in a quotation from Aristotle (515 PMG = 2 Poltera):
καὶ ὁ Σιμωνίδης ὅτε μὲν ἐδίδου μισθὸν ὀλίγον αὐτῶι ὁ νικήσας τοῖς ὀρεῦσιν οὐκ ἤθελε ποιεῖν ὡς δυσχεραίνων εἰς ἡμιόνους ποιεῖν, ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ἱκανὸν ἔδωκεν ἐποίησε ·
χαίρετ᾽ ἀελλοπόδων θύγατρες ἵππων.
καίτοι καὶ τῶν ὄνων θυγατέρες ἦσαν.
And Simonides, when the victor in the race for the mule-cart was offering a small fee, did not want to compose a song, since he felt it was distasteful to compose in praise of mules. But when he offered enough, he composed the song starting:
Hail, daughters of storm-footed horses!
even though they were the daughters of donkeys too.
Other sources name the patron: the tyrant Anaxilas of Rhegium (he commemorated the same victory in the mule-cart race on a coin). We have no way to test the historicity of the anecdote (there are several testimonia which associate Simonides with a mean, calculating attitude to composing for money), which is probably fictional, though I have argued elsewhere that it is likely to be early.16 However, even if fictional, it seems to be prompted by features of the song itself: Simonides’ own words, by drawing attention only to the “better” half of the mules’ ancestry, invite the response that Aristotle provides: they are donkeys’ daughters too! In doing so, they seem to diminish Anaxilas’ achievement by drawing attention to the inferior status of the race for the mule-cart by comparison with the most prestigious events, i.e., horse races and races for the four-horse chariot. The effect is presumably humorous, and this is a kind of humor that reveals and releases tension in the social relationship between patron and poet. As with the Scopas song, praise seems far from whole-hearted.17
Communities and Commemoration: Simonides’ Elegies
It has always been known that as well as the melic genres Simonides was also a poet of elegy (a less complex musical form, characterized by a couplet meter close to the single-line meter used for epic). Not long ago, however, the fragments of Simonidean elegy, as gathered for example in Campbell’s Loeb edition, were few in number and mostly small (the largest two were a strange riddle by which the speaker asks for snow to cool his drink and a reflection on the traditional comparison of human lives with leaves that starts from a quotation of Iliad 6.146).18 Small fragments were mostly gathered into a sub-group of which we were warned that they might come from epigram (i.e., inscribed epigram on tombstones or monuments or dedications, which is usually in the same elegiac meter). This included most of those associated with battles of the Persian Wars, even though we had some (rather confusing) evidence to suggest that Simonides composed extended elegies about these battles.19 All of this changed in 1992, with the publication of P. Oxy. 3965, a papyrus of the Roman period from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. This papyrus contained elegiac fragments which overlapped quotations of Simonides in the literary tradition and could thus be identified as Simonidean; it also overlapped with a previously published papyrus (P. Oxy. 2327) such as to identify its contents as Simonides as well.20
The new material includes fragments which seem to handle erotic subject matter (especially frr. 21 and 22 W) and to engage with traditional wisdom content such as we see in Theognis (19 and 20 W), and these are generally supposed to be fragments from fairly short elegies composed for performance in the symposion. Perhaps the greatest excitement, however, was occasioned by fragments which seemed to bear witness to a kind of longer narrative-dominated elegy which was previously much harder to see, featuring accounts of battles in the Persian Wars. The fullest of these, though still fragmentary, is 11 W, concerning the Battle of Plataea, the last major battle by which the Persian invasion of mainland Greece was defeated. The text below (where material [enclosed by square brackets] is supplemented) draws substantially on the edition by M. L. West.
π̣α̣ι̣[ ̣ ̣ ] σ̣ ̣ [
ἢ πίτυν ἐν βήσ[σαις
ὑλοτόμοι τάμ[νωσι
πολλὸν δ’ †ἤρῶσ[
]ο̣ς λαὸν̣[ 5
Πατρ]όκλου σα̣[
οὐ δή τίς σ’ ἐδ]ά̣μασσεν ἐφ̣[ημέριος βροτὸς αὐτός,
ἀλλ’ ὑπ’ Ἀπόλλ]ωνος χειρὶ [τυπεὶς ἐδάμης.
]σ̣εουσαπ ̣[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣( ̣)]στ[
Πρ]ι̣άμου παισὶ χ[αλεπτ]ομ̣[εν 10
εἵνεκ’ Ἀλεξά]ν̣δ̣ρ̣ο̣ιο κακόφρ[ονο]ς, ὡς. σ̣ ̣[
] ̣θείης ἅρμα καθεῖλε δί̣κ̣[ης
τοὶ δὲ πόλι]ν πέρσαντες ἀοίδιμον [οἴκαδ’ ἵ]κοντο
ἔξοχοι ἡρ]ώων̣ ἀγχέμαχοι Δαναοί[,
οἷσιν ἐπ’ ἀθά]νατον κέχυται κλέος ἀν[δρὸς] ἕκητι 15
ὃς παρ’ ἰοπ]λοκάμων δέξατο Πιερίδ[ων
πᾶσαν ἀλη]θείην, καὶ ἐπώνυμον ὁπ̣[λοτέρ]οισιν
ποίησ’ ἡμ]ί̣θεων ὠκύμορον γενεή̣[ν.
ἀλλὰ σὺ μὲ]ν νῦν χαῖρε, θεᾶς ἐρικυ[δέος υἱέ
κούρης εἰν]αλίου Νηρέος· αὐτὰρ ἐγώ̣[ 20
κικλήισκω] σ’ ἐπίκουρον ἐμοί, π̣[ολυώνυμ]ε Μοῦσα,
εἴ πέρ γ’ ἀν]θρώπων̣ εὐχομένω[ν μέλεαι·
ἔντυνο]ν̣ καὶ τόνδ[ε μελ]ί̣φρονα κ[όσμον ἀο]ιδῆς
ἡμετ]έ̣ρης, ἵνα τις̣ [μνή]σ̣ε̣τ̣α̣ι̣ υ̣[
ἀνδρῶ]ν, οἳ Σπάρτ[ηι δούλιον ἦμ]αρ 25
̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ] ἀμ̣υν[ ] ̣ ̣[ ]ω̣[
οὐδ’ ἀρε]τ̣ῆς ἐλάθ[οντο ]ν οὐρανομ̣[ήκ]ης,
καὶ κλέος ἀ]ν̣θρώ̣π̣ω̣ν̣ [ἔσσετ]α̣ι̣ ἀθάνατο < ν >.
οἳ μὲν ἄρ’ Εὐ]ρώτ̣αν κα[ὶ ἐϋκλεὲ]ς ἄστυ λιπόντε[ς
ὥρμησαν] Ζηνὸς παισὶ σὺν ἱπποδάμοις 30
Τυνδαρίδα]ις ἥρωσι καὶ εὐρυβίηι Μενελάω[ι
̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ πατ]ρ̣ώιης ἡγεμόνες π[ό]λ̣εος,
τοῦς δ’ υἱὸς θείοιο Κλεο]μ̣β̣[ρ]ότ̣ου ἔξ̣[α]γ’ ἄριστ[ος
]α․γ̣Παυσανίης.
] ̣καὶ ἐπικλέα ἔργα Κορίν[θ]ου
] Τ̣ανταλίδεω Πέλοπος 36
Ν]ί̣σου πόλιν, ἔνθά περ ὥ[λλοι
] φ̣ῦλα περικτιόνων
̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣θεῶν τεράε]σ̣σι π̣εποιθότε̣ς, οἳ δὲ συν[
ἷκον Ἐλευσῖνος γῆς ἐ]ρ̣α̣τὸ̣ν πεδίον 40
Παν]δίο̣νος ἐξε[λάσα]ντες
μάν]τ̣ι̣ος ἀντ̣ι̣θέο̣υ̣[
] ̣ς δαμάσαντ̣[
] ̣ι̣ εἰδομεν̣[
ώ]νυμον α ̣[ 45
Struck… or a pine tree in the groves… the woodcutters chop it down… much… (5) the army… of Patroclus… it was no mortal creature of a day that laid you low by himself, but you were conquered struck by the hand of Apollo… (10) angry with the sons of Priam, on account of evil-minded Paris… the chariot of justice destroyed… And they, having sacked the song-famed city, made their way home, pre-eminent among heroes, the close-fighting Danaans, (15) upon whom immortal fame has been poured on account of that man who received all truthful renown from the violet-haired Pierian Muses, and made the short-lived race of demigods famous to men who came after. But hail to you now, son of the glorious goddess, (20) of the daughter of Nereus of the sea! Now I call upon you, Muse of many names, as my ally, if you do care for the prayers of men. Put in order this well-tempered ornament of my song, so that somebody will remember… (25) of the men, who from Sparta… the day of slavery… nor did they forget their excellence… high as heaven… and the glory of these men will be undying. Leaving the Eurotas and the well-famed city (30) they set out, with the Tyndarid heroes and wide-ruling Menelaus… the leaders of the homeland… and the son of godlike Cleombrotus led them, the best… Pausanias… (35) and the renowned fields of Corinth… of Tantalid Pelops… Nisus’ city, from which the others… the tribes of neighbors… having trusted the signs of the gods… and these… (40) arrived at the lovely plain of the Eleusinian land… driving out from the land of Pandion… of the godlike seer… conquered…
Much is uncertain here: while admiring the skill of scholars who have reconstructed and supplemented this text from multiple papyrus fragments we should note that it remains the case that not one line is transmitted complete. But we can still see something of what is going on here. We start with material to do with the Trojan War, including (probably) Achilles and Patroclus—this suggests the Iliad as well as Trojan tradition more broadly—and in a sign that the story is presented in a more overtly pro-Achaean way than in Homer the destruction of Troy seems to be blamed on “evil-minded Paris” (while the fame provided by Homer and the Muses in lines 15–18 is reserved for the Danaans, i.e., the “Greek” side). The appeal to Homeric precedent is overt and invites an intertextual reading, by which Simonides presents himself as a contemporary analogous figure to the greatest poet. Yet he is Homer with a twist: where Homer presents himself as a mouthpiece who invites the Muse(s) to speak through him, Simonides’ muse is an “ally” (ἐπίκουρος), so that he seems a more active participant in the process by which the verse is generated: a sign of change in the role of the poet as provider of praise, and also of the fact that Simonides (unlike Homer) is a contemporary of the events he describes. He seems to emphasize the Spartan contribution and the leadership in particular, which may be related to circumstances of the first performance (was this a Spartan commission?). The poem seems to enact and revise epic commemoration in elegiac form, and we see the negotiation of the space between the epic past and contemporary events played out such as to work out a new relationship between poet, models, Muse, and material.
Money, Memory, and the Burial of the Dead: Simonides’ Ancient Reception
Reception of Simonides through allusion is often hard to trace because of the fragmentary preservation of his works—but the publication of P. Oxy. 3965 meant that more has become visible.21 What is much more apparent is reception of Simonides of other kinds, in the form of anecdotes about the poet and his interaction with contemporaries: the anecdotal tradition about Simonides is richer than for any other lyric poet, with the possible exception of Sappho.22 We can at least sometimes see continuity between themes explored in Simonides’ poetry and those emphasized in these anecdotes, so that they seem to be motivated by a way of reading his poems rather than wholly arbitrary (even if they then develop an independent life of their own); in any case they are better read as a form of reception rather than with a view to extracting concrete historical data.23 A particularly strong thread in this tradition concerns Simonides as a man with a particular interest in money and remuneration, an interest which can be associated with tensions in his relationships with wealthy patrons.24 Already in Aristophanes (Peace 695–699) Simonides is the type of old man who would go to sea in a sieve for money.25 This is likely to go back to Simonides’ lifetime: his willingness to compose songs of all kinds for a wide variety of wealthy customers (especially tyrants like Hieron of Syracuse and Thessalian noblemen like Scopas) could be perceived as evidence of avarice; we have already seen how the strange beginning of his song for Anaxilas of Rhegium generated anecdote associating it with remuneration for song.
A separate tradition associates Simonides with the commemoration and burial of the dead. This, too, may well have been generated from features of his own work. Although the number of fragments is not great, we know that Simonides composed thrēnoi (dirges). He was also a poet of inscribed epigrams, including epitaphs. This is an area of some controversy, since a number of epigrams are attributed to Simonides by later sources but not by earlier ones who also quote them, and several are attributed to Simonides which seem impossibly late (either by virtue of style, content, or both). It appears that a collection of Simonidean epigrams (called in the scholarship the “Sylloge Simonidea”) which circulated in antiquity was alarmingly receptive to non-Simonidean material.26 The result of this has been that almost any epigram attributed to Simonides has been regarded as of dubious authorship: in many cases we simply cannot tell how it got its attribution. The broader problem (how to decide whether an epigram is by Simonides or not?) is one I shall not consider in detail here; however, it seems to me overwhelmingly likely that we should adopt the commonsensical view that at least part of the reason why it became common to attribute epigrams to Simonides was that he really was a composer of epigram. Here too, then, he was associated particularly (through attribution of funerary epigrams) with commemoration of the dead; and this association spills into other kinds of reception.
This story is given here as found in Cicero but is also known from other sources: on the face of it, it represents a story developing this perception of Simonides as a form of reception through anecdote. The speaker introduces a story about Simonides as an example of a prophetic dream (Cicero de divinatione 1.56):
One concerns Simonides: when he saw that a corpse had been thrown up from the sea and buried him, he then intended to board a ship, but it seems that he was warned not to do so by the man whose burial he had arranged, saying that if he sailed he would perish in a shipwreck. And so Simonides returned home but the others who participated in the voyage perished.
In this case two epigrams have also been transmitted, supposed to be understood as composed by Simonides first at the point of burying the stranger, and secondly when he realized that he had been saved from shipwreck (Simonides epigram 84 = AP 7.516 and epigram 85 = AP 7.77):
οἱ μὲν ἐμὲ κτείναντες ὁμοίων ἀντιτύχοιεν,
Ζεῦ ξένι᾿, οἱ δ᾿ ὑπὸ γᾶν θέντες ὄναιντο βίου.
May those who killed me suffer the same fate,
Zeus of Strangers; and may those who buried me get enjoyment of life.
οὗτος ὁ τοῦ Κείοιο Σιμωνίδου ἐστὶ σαωτήρ,
ὃς καὶ τεθνηὼς ζῶντι παρέσχε χάριν.
This man is the saviour of Simonides of Ceos.
Even dead he repaid his gratitude to the living.
Simonides seems to take on a quasi-sacred role in relation to the dead, for which he is repaid by the salvation given through the dream; I think it is likely that the two epigrams were composed after Simonides’ lifetime as part of the same process of creative reception that generated the story.27
Finally, Simonides is associated with memory and with writing: the technology of memory. This is perhaps unsurprising given his link with epigram and with the commemoration of events and persons, particularly the dead. However, the tradition makes from this surprisingly specific claims: not only that Simonides, like Homer or other poets, has the power to commemorate the dead and the living (as he implicitly claims in the Plataea elegy, for example), but also that he was the inventor of specific mnemonic techniques of a type that were used later in antiquity and are still used today, by which the things to be remembered are mentally arranged in an imagined space (a memory palace or memory journey).28 With regard to writing, he is said to have introduced new letters to the alphabet.29 These claims are unlikely to be true, but it is fascinating to speculate about how they came about; in any case this happened early enough for them to have informed Hellenistic sources, even though the tour-de-force of the memory tradition is a story attested most fully in Roman texts. Here I give Cicero’s account, but the version in Quintilian gives sources and variants attesting to a tradition reaching back to at least the Hellenistic period, and the story was alluded to by Callimachus in the third century BC (Cicero de oratore 2.86.351–3, trans. Campbell; cf. 510 PMG, T80 Poltera):
“I am not such a genius as Themistocles,” he said, “so as to prefer an art of forgetting to an art of remembering, and I am grateful to the famous Simonides of Ceos, who is said to have been the first to devise an art of remembering. The story goes that he was dining at Crannon in Thessaly at the house of a prosperous nobleman called Scopas and had sung the song which he had composed for him, in which by way of ornament he had inserted many references to Castor and Pollux as poets do; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness declared that he would pay him half of the agreed fee for the song; if he thought fit, he could apply for the other half to his Tyndaridae, since he had devoted an equal share of the praise to them. Shortly afterwards, they say, a message was brought to Simonides telling him to go outside, since two young men were standing by the door, urgently calling him out. He got up and went out but saw no one; and in the meantime the hall where Scopas was dining collapsed, crushing him and his relatives to death. When their kinsmen wanted to bury them and were quite unable to tell the bodies apart, Simonides, they say, was able from his recollection of the place where each had reclined at the table to identify them for individual burial. It was this, they say, that prompted his discovery that it is order above all that serves as an aid to clear memory.”
On an optimistic reading, this might have been composed in the light of a song of Simonides addressed to Scopas (the same Thessalian nobleman addressed in the song from which we have fr. 542 PMG, discussed above) and featuring the Dioscuri, just as we can see that the anecdote associated with fr. 515, from the song for Anaxilas, was motivated by features of a particular song; but it is hard to be confident even about this.30 Here we see a wide range of Simonides’ traditional characteristics in reception converging: the interest in remuneration (but in this case presented in a way which casts blame emphatically on the patron and not the poet), closeness to the gods which gives him a quasi-sacred function, commemoration of the dead, and memory as a technique. Both in this combination of features more commonly found separately and in the presentation of remuneration issues in such a way that the patron rather than Simonides is at fault, this story seems uncharacteristic, but for its memorability and its high visibility in Roman authors it became the story that represented Simonides more than any other in the western half of Europe in the middle ages. The combination of threads provides a story and an image of the poet which remains powerful, however unhistorical, and which informed his ancient reception elsewhere.31
FURTHER READING
The Loeb edition (Campbell Vol. III) gives an excellent text and translation of the melic fragments and epigrams (and selected testimonia) but predates the first publication of P. Oxy. 3965, and is therefore outdated for the elegies, where for text and translation one should go to Boedeker and Sider 2001 or Sider 2020. Poltera 2008 is a very full edition of testimonia and melic fragments with translation and commentary in German. There are good selections in Greek with (English) commentary in Budelmann 2018b and Hutchinson 2001. Sider 2020 gives text, translation, and commentary for the elegies and epigrams. Carson 1999 is stimulating but unreliable. My own book (Rawles 2018) focuses on a) places where Simonides’ interaction with earlier poetry is most apparent and b) the thread in his ancient reception where issues to do with wealth are most foregrounded; as such, coverage is selective.
Notes
1 For testimonia, see the Loeb edition by Campbell (1991, with translations), and Poltera 2008 (untranslated, but fuller). On the chronological questions see Molyneux 1992 (more briefly Poltera 2008: 7–8, in German); Hutchinson 2001: 288 is appropriately sceptical. It is famously hard to draw historical facts from anecdotes about poets’ lives (see Lefkowitz 2012 [first ed. 1981], and on Simonidean anecdote particularly Bell 1978, Rawles 2018: 155–225).
2 See Rosenmeyer 1991: 1–9. Rosenmeyer rejects such readings as anachronistic, but unjustly so in my view (while her own reading is nevertheless very valuable).
3 Rosenmeyer 1991: 23.
4 Hutchinson 2001: 308, in a sensitive treatment, thinks of Euripides.
5 For a radically different suggestion for how to put these fragments in order, see Beresford 2008; but this requires us to interpret Plato’s presentation of the poem in a very strange way. Cf. e.g., Budelmann 2018b: 216.
6 Cf. 581 PMG = 262 Poltera; Rawles 2018: 145–148.
7 Most 1994: 136–138.
8 Countering earlier readings of Simonides’ song as philosophically/ethically innovative, see e.g., Dickie 1978, Most 1994: 139–142.
9 Dickie 1978, Carson 1992a, Most 1994: 143–147.
10 Cf. Most 1994: 147 with n. 60.
11 Obbink 2001: 75–77; Lowe 2007: 175–176. The number of books may have been as great as seven or eight.
12 Rawles 2012: 3–12 with references to earlier scholarship, especially Barron 1984.
13 In what follows I draw on work presented at greater length in Rawles 2012, Rawles 2013.
14 Frr. 516, 517 PMG (5, 6 Poltera). On “sports writing” in Bacchylides, see Hadjimichael 2015.
15 Bowra 1961: 326; Molyneux 1992: 36.
16 Rawles 2012: 20–25; Rawles 2018: 174–178.
17 Gentili 1988: 112 speaks aptly of a “poetics of tempered praise” in Simonides. Peculiar qualities visible in Simonidean epinician may in part reflect the interests of quoting authors, and some papyrus fragments seem less odd (cf. Rawles 2013: 198–201, contrasting Aristophanic intertexts with fr. 511 PMG = 7 Poltera, on which Budelmann 2018b: 206–207, comments that “Various features […] suggest strong continuities with Pindar’s and Bacchylides’ epinician poetics.”).
18 Campbell Vol III: 506–519. The snow poem is fr. 25 in the now standard edition (West), where the leaves elegy is represented by frr. 19–20; in the Loeb these are frr. eleg. 6 and 8.
19 In an important article, whose argument was to a large degree confirmed by the discovery of new fragments, Ewen Bowie had argued for a tradition of long, narrative elegies performed at festivals to which such battle elegies might belong: Bowie 1986. After the publication of the new papyrus, the evidence was re-assessed in Kowerski 2005; cf. Rawles 2018: 269–280.
20 The editio princeps in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri was by Peter Parsons, and at approximately the same time the new material was included by M. L. West in the second edition of his Iambi et elegi Graeci (1992), which I refer to below as W. The most useful guide to the new material is Boedeker and Sider 2001.
21 On allusions to Simonides in ancient literature see Rawles 2013 (Aristophanes), papers by Fantuzzi, Hunter, Barchiesi and Harrison in Boedeker and Sider 2001 (Theocritus, Callimachus, Horace), Barchiesi 1996 (Horace), Rawles 2018: 226–268 (Theocritus).
22 See Bell 1978, Rawles 2018: 155–225.
23 Rawles 2018: 194–225. On the “poets’ lives” traditions more broadly see Lefkowitz 2012, Kivilo 2010.
24 This is the element in his reception which I analysed at length in the second half of Rawles 2018.
25 See testimonia 22–23 Campbell. According to this scholia on this passage, already Simonides’ contemporary Xenophanes called him a “skinflint.”
26 On the “sylloge Simonidea” see e.g., Rawles 2018: 207 with n. 38, giving more bibliography.
27 For an alternative explanation, however, see Sider 2016: 143–144, for whom Simonides composed an autobiographical elegy in which the epigrammatic distichs were embedded.
28 See testimonia 24–26 Campbell and 510 PMG (T80 Poltera). This technique was widely practised in antiquity and the middle ages, though probably not invented by Simonides; the history of such techniques is the subject of the classic study Yates 1966.
29 Probably already at Callimachus fr. 64.9–10; cf. testimonium 1 Campbell with his n. 6.
30 For a fuller treatment with bibliography see Rawles 2018: 187–191.
31 Already in Callimachus: fr. 64 Pfeiffer.