Simonides

Greek lyric poet

• Born: c. 556 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Iulis, Island of Ceos (now Kéa), Greece
• Died: c. 467 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Syracuse, Sicily (now in Italy)

Having advanced the quality of Greek lyric poetry through his elegies and epigrams, Simonides brought the dithyramb and Epinician ode to a level of perfection comparable only to that of Pindar.

Early Life

One of the epigrams of Simonides (si-MON-ih-deez), number 203, reveals both its author’s place and year of birth; it is in this poem that he celebrates a victory prize he won at the age of eighty in the archonship of Adeimantus. Other ancient sources confirm these dates, and one can be certain that Simonides lived to the age of eighty-nine or ninety or even longer, if one believes the testimony of Lucian.

Unlike many of the Greek lyric poets, a surprisingly complete genealogy remains extant for Simonides. His father’s name was Leoprepes, and his maternal grandfather’s name was Hyllichus. His paternal grandfather, also named Simonides, and a grandson known as Simonides Genealogus were poets as well. In addition, the dithyrambic poet Bacchylides was his nephew. It is clear that literary inclinations ran deeply in Simonides’ family.

According to traditional accounts, the family of Simonides held some form of hereditary post in connection with Dionysus, and this would account for Simonides’ early access to music and poetry festivals held in that god’s honor. Supposedly, while still a boy, Simonides instructed the choruses and celebrated the worship of Apollo at Carthaea. Pindar, who became Simonides’ bitter rival, criticized both Simonides and Bacchylides for these early involvements, castigating them both as tous mathontas (“the teachers”), with the implication that they were pedants.

Sometime after 528 b.c.e., the tyrant Hipparchus invited Simonides to his court at Athens, and it was here that the poet acquired his first major celebrity. The poets Anacreon and Lasus, the teacher of Pindar, were present at Hipparchus’s court at this time. Simonides appears to have had only minimal contact with Anacreon. The relationship between Simonides and Lasus appears, however, to have been contentious from the outset. They engaged in a number of poetry contests filled with personal invective, and Lasus’s student Pindar would carry on this enmity to the final years of Simonides’ life.

Based on encomia attributed to him, Simonides appears to have weathered the political storms that resulted from the murder of Hipparchus and the expulsion of his successor Hippias. With consummate irony, an inscription attributed to Simonides praises the tyrannicide committed by Harmodius and Aristogiton and calls the death of his patron “a great light rising upon the Athenians.” This inscription probably appeared at the base of a publicly displayed statue of Harmodius and Aristogiton. The point at which one might consider the career of Simonides to be established, approximately 510 b.c.e., thus coincides with the death or expulsion of those who had helped him achieve recognition.

Life’s Work

The unstable situation in Athens following the overthrow of the Pisistratids probably led Simonides to seek the patronage of the Aleuads and the Scopads in Thessaly. If the assessment of the poet Theocritus is correct, the names of these ruling families escaped oblivion only through the encomia that Simonides wrote in their honor to celebrate the victories of their horses at the sacred games. Most noteworthy among the extant works of Simonides is the substantial fragment of the Epinician ode on the victory of the four-horse chariot of Scopas. Plato preserves and comments on this poem (number 13) in his Prōtagoras (399-390 b.c.e.; Protagoras, 1804). “Fragments on the Fall of the Scopads” (number 46) and “Antiochus the Aleuad” (number 48) are among Simonides’ most familiar works. It is even possible that a threnody on Danae is a poem originally written for one of the Scopads.

Despite this considerable involvement with the tyrants of Thessaly, it seems that Simonides’ relationship with them was never an easy one. The region was rugged, and the arts, praised as they might have been in the abstract, always took second place when it came to the granting of subventions. Cicero, in De oratore (56 b.c.e.; The Orations, 1741-1743), cites the poet Callimachus as his authority for the story that Scopas, having heard Simonides’ Castor and Pollux ode, gave the poet only one-half the agreed payment, telling Simonides that he should request the other half from the Tyndarids, because they had received half the praise in Simonides’ poem. The tale assumes a somewhat fantastic character at this point. Having received a message that two young men wished to speak to him, Simonides, just humiliated by Scopas’s behavior, left the hall to see the two young men supposedly waiting for him at the entrance to the banquet hall. When he left the hall, however, he could find no one, but he heard a sudden crash, and the entire hall fell on Scopas, killing him and the other revelers who had ridiculed Simonides.

It is, of course, hardly likely that this event occurred as Cicero relates it. The tale concludes with the implication that the two young men were the Dioscuri themselves, Castor and Pollux. They made their half of the payment due Simonides, and the larger moral lesson of the tale is that those who treat artists with unkindness incur the wrath of the gods. Presumably, the legend also implies that tyrants such as Scopas fall from power because of their own hubris. Evidently, this was a popular narrative in the ancient world, as variations of it appear in a diverse number of ancient writings, including those of Callimachus, Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, Aristeides, and Phaedrus. Ironically, assuming that the part about Scopas’s refusal of full payment is true, only the part of the poem that refers to his family line survives; that which refers to the Dioscuri is no longer extant. Fantastic though the story is on the literal level, it nevertheless reflects the high esteem that cultured people of the day felt for Simonides even as it records the sudden historical demise of odious rulers such as Scopas. In this, it follows the same structure as the myth of Arion, who was saved by a dolphin, or of lbycus, who was avenged by cranes.

In any event, the period of this tale approximates the time of the Persian invasion, and it is at this juncture that Simonides must have returned to Athens, for his poems from this time celebrate Athenian bravery in the Persian Wars.

At this stage in his career, Simonides began to associate himself with the military leaders of Athens, his career again reflecting the prevailing political winds. It was Miltiades who, in 490 b.c.e., commissioned an epigram (number 188) for a statue of Pan, dedicated to commemorate the Battle of Marathon (490 b.c.e.). One measure of the incredible success Simonides had achieved since his first departure from Athens is the fact that, in the following year, he defeated no less a poet than Aeschylus in the contest to produce an elegy that would honor those who had fallen at Marathon (fragment 58).

Simonides’ works written during this period include the epigrams inscribed on the tombs of those Spartans who fell at Thermopylae as well as an accompanying encomium (epigrams 150-155, fragment 9). His circle of acquaintance remained among the powerful, including the statesman Themistocles. An apocryphal story that parallels the Scopas narrative surrounds their acquaintance. In this story, cited by Plutarch in “Themistocles” (in Bioi paralleloi, c. 105-115; Parallel Lives, 1579), the statesman criticizes the poet for making extraordinary demands on public resources when commissioned to write commemorative verse for public occasions.

The extant works of Simonides reveal that many such commissions must have been forthcoming in the wake of the Persian Wars. The Battle of Plataea (479 b.c.e.) provided the occasion for an elegy (fragment 59) as well as the famous epigram (198) inscribed on the tripod fabricated from Persian spoils and dedicated collectively at Delphi by the victorious Greek cities. Thucydides reported that, because this inscription too completely attributed the Greek victory to the general Pausanias, the Spartans erased Pausanias’s name and substituted, as though for an epic catalog, the names of all the Greek states that had taken part in the war. In any event, the zenith of Simonides’ career was clearly his victory in the dithyrambic chorus competition held in 477 b.c.e. during the archonship of Adeimantus. Simonides would have been eighty years of age at this time, and this would have been, by his own reporting (epigrams 203-204), his fifty-sixth victory prize.

The final stage in Simonides’ career began about 476 b.c.e. with his decision to accept the invitation of the tyrant Hiero to establish himself at Syracuse. Tales of his diplomatic prowess at Hiero’s court describe his mediation of a peace between Hiero and Theron of Agrigentum, and the historian Xenophon records a dialogue between Simonides and Hiero on the positive and negative arguments for government by tyranny. Cicero, in De natura deorum (44 b.c.e.; On the Nature of the Gods, 1683), describes Simonides’ evasive answer to Hiero on the nature of divinity.

Significance

It seems that Simonides’ continuing dependence on tyrants arose from practical necessity, but it also seems that he was able consistently to assemble a circle of personal friends who could support his aesthetic needs. The wife of Hiero, for example, protected his interests to some degree by interceding with her husband when necessary; she also became Simonides’ interlocutor in philosophic conversations. At one time or another Pindar, Bacchylides, and Aeschylus were in residence at Hiero’s court so that Simonides had little want of stimulating conversation, even when opinions differed. In all, Simonides had few wants at any time in his life. Indeed, despite his often uneasy relationship with the Syracusan tyrant and stories of Hiero’s reluctance to pay for commissioned works, Simonides received such a generous allowance of daily supplies from the royal household that he often sold what he did not need and thereby provided himself with additional income.

Perhaps Simonides’ distaste for opulence also led him to sell his excess supplies. His poems reveal that he held the conservative philosophic view traditional with the Greeks, in which sophrosyne (“genuine wisdom”), temperance, and order arose from moderation. Moreover, he reverenced traditional religion, and this appears in his treatment of the ancient myths. The polemical character of his political poems indicates that he considered one function of poetry to be educational and that those most in need of such education were often his patrons. In some sense, his works imply a kind of philosophic stoicism. One should enjoy, as much as possible, the calm reflection that literature offers despite the storms and stresses of the moment.

There is, of course, the other side of the argument. Simonides did live amid and depend on the very excesses his philosophic outlook condemned. If inclined to view these facts cynically, one could accuse him of hypocrisy, but perhaps it is better to consider him a realist. He believed in the power of the arts to change human behavior, and if he used support from unsavory sources in order to achieve the results he desired, he was simply making use of the instruments available to him.

In any event, his reputation among the popular audience never suffered, and his patriotic poems always won immediate general acclaim. These, primarily because they reflected a Panhellenic view rather than the local perspective prevailing at the various locations in which he resided, encouraged a spirit of Greek identity not present in actuality until the Hellenistic period.

Bibliography

Bowra, C. M. Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Volume of criticism and interpretation includes bibliography and index.

Bowra C. M., and T. F. Higham, eds. Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation. Rev. ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1972. Contains the largest selection of Greek verse in a single source; more than seven hundred items with good notes that cite parallels and explain content.

Hutchinson, G. O. Greek Lyric Poetry, a Commentary on Selected Larger Pieces: Alcman, Stesichorus, Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides, Bacchylides, Pindar. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Provides excellent translations and a good selection of poems as well as easy accessibility.

Molyneux, John H. Simonides: A Historical Study. Chicago: Bolzchazy Carducci, 1992. Thoroughly examines the documentary evidence available with respect to Simonides and the dating of events and poetry in the various stages of his career.

Skelton, Robin. Two Hundred Poems from the Greek Anthology. London: Methuen, 1971. Generally good translations of a variety of poems. The introduction is particularly suitable for general readers new to Greek verse, though there are no notes to the individual poems.