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Simonides of Ceos (Ancient Greek: S?µ???d?? ? ?e???) (c. 556 BC-468 BC), Greek lyric poet, was born at Ioulis on Kea. He was included, along with Sappho and Pindar, in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. He was uncle to Bacchylides, another of the nine lyric poets. He is the narrator and main character of Mary Renault's historical novel The Praise Singer.
Biography
Simonides, a philosopher as well as a poet, was born in Iulis, Ceos (??????, ????).
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Quotations
We did not flinch but gave our lives to save Greece when her fate hung on a razor's edge.
From the Cenotaph at the Isthmos
Encyclopedia
Simonides of Ceos (Ancient Greek: S?µ???d?? ? ?e???) (c. 556 BC-468 BC), Greek lyric poet, was born at Ioulis on Kea. He was included, along with Sappho and Pindar, in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. He was uncle to Bacchylides, another of the nine lyric poets. He is the narrator and main character of Mary Renault's historical novel The Praise Singer.
Biography
Simonides, a philosopher as well as a poet, was born in Iulis, Ceos (??????, ????). During his youth he taught poetry and music, and composed paeans for the festivals of Apollo. Finding little scope for his abilities at home, he went to live at Athens, at the court of Hipparchus, the patron of literature. After the murder of Hipparchus (514 BC), Simonides withdrew to Thessaly, where he enjoyed the protection and patronage of the Scopadae and Aleuadae (two celebrated Thessalian families).
Cicero (De oratore, ii. 86) tells the story of the end of his relations with the Scopadae. His patron, Scopas, reproached him at a banquet for devoting too much space to a praise of Castor and Pollux in an ode celebrating Scopas' victory in a chariot-race. Scopas refused to pay all the fee and told Simonides to apply to the twin gods for the remainder. Shortly afterwards, Simonides was told that two young men wished to speak to him; after he had left the banqueting room, the roof fell in and crushed Scopas and his guests (). During the excavation of the rubble, Simonides was called upon to identify each guest killed. He managed to do so by correlating their identities to their positions (loci in Latin) at the table before his departure. After thanking Castor and Pollux for paying their half of the fee by saving his life, Simonides drew on this experience to develop the 'memory theatre' or 'memory palace', a system for information management widely used in oral societies until the Renaissance. He is often credited with inventing this ancient system of mnemonics (Quintilian xi.2,n).
After the Battle of Marathon, Simonides returned to Athens, but soon left for Sicily at the invitation of Hiero I of Syracuse, at whose court he spent the rest of his life.
His nephew was Bacchylides, an important poet in his own right.
His reputation as a man of learning is shown by the tradition that he introduced the distinction between the long and short vowels (e, ?, ?, ?), afterwards adopted in the Ionic alphabet that came into general use during the archonship of Eucleides (403 BCE).
So unbounded was his popularity that he was a power even in the political world; we are told that he reconciled Hiero and Thero on the eve of a battle between their opposing armies. He was the intimate friend of Themistocles and Pausanias the Spartan, and his poems on the war of liberation against Persia no doubt gave a powerful impulse to the national patriotism.
For his poems he could command almost any price: later writers, from Aristophanes onwards, accuse him of avarice, probably not without some reason. To Hiero's queen, who asked him whether it was better to be born rich or a genius, he replied "Rich, for genius is ever found at the gates of the rich." Again, when someone asked him to write a laudatory poem for which he offered profuse thanks, but no money, Simonides replied that he kept two coffers, one for thanks, the other for money; that, when he opened them, he found the former empty and useless, and the latter full.
Later, he died in c.468BC in Syracuse, Sicily, Italy. His reason for death is unknown.
Poetry
He wrote odes to victors and dirges. Also, he wrote songs of praise to the gods. His poems were usually about war along with many thoughtful topics. Of his poetry we possess two or three short elegies (Fr. 85 seems from its style and versification to belong to Simonides of Amorgos, or at least not to be the work of our poet), several epigrams and about 90 fragments of lyric and choral poetry. The epigrams written in the usual dialect of elegy, Ionic with an epic colouring, were intended partly for public and partly for private monuments.
There is strength and sublimity in the former, with a simplicity that is almost statuesque, and a complete mastery over the rhythm and forms of elegiac expression. Those on the heroes of Marathon and the Battle of Thermopylae are the most celebrated.
-
- .
- O xein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti têde
- keimetha tois keinon rhémasi peithomenoi.
which may be translated literally as "Stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here, obedient to their utterances/orders/laws." (note: "??µas?" most literally means "according to the verbiage.") See here for a list of English translations in rhyme.
Thomas Bullfinch wrote that Simonides "particularly excelled" in the genre of elegy: "His genius was inclined to the pathetic, and none could touch with truer effect the chords of human sympathy."
In the private epigrams there is more warmth of colour and feeling, but few of them rest on any better authority than that of the Greek Anthology. One interesting and undoubtedly genuine epigram of this class is upon Archedice, the daughter of Hippias the Peisistratid, who, "albeit her father and husband and brother and children were all princes, was not lifted up in soul to pride."
The lyric fragments vary much in character and length: one is from a poem on Artemisium, celebrating those who fell at Thermopylae, with which he gained the victory over Aeschylus; another is an ode in honour of Scopas (commented on in Plato, Protagoras, 339 b); the rest are from odes on victors in the games, hyporchemes, dirges, hymns to the gods and other varieties.
He achieved numerous successes in dithyrambic competitions. (A later poet credited Simonides with 57 victories.) In the competition, Simonides was selected (above such celebrated poets as Aeschylus) to compose the elegiac verses commemorating those who fell in the battle of Marathon. He celebrated the Greek victories of the Persian Wars, including a famous encomium for the Spartan dead at Thermopylae. Simonides maintained close ties with the Spartan general and regent Pausanias. He traveled to Sicily as a guest of the courts of Hieron I, tyrant of Syracuse, and Theron, tyrant of Acragas; tradition there made him and Bacchylides the rivals of Pindar. He is said to have reconciled the two tyrants when they quarreled.
There emerges from his longer fragments, such as the encomium of Scopas, an original and nonconformist personality that questions the innate and absolute values of the aristocratic ethic, which are the basis of Pindar’s worldview. Simonides’ worldview, in contrast, is in sympathy with the social setting determined by the rise of the new mercantile classes. His moral outlook is pragmatic, realistic, and relativistic; he is conscious of the imperfection and frailty of human accomplishments.
Simonides changed the conception and practice of poetic activity by insisting that a patron who commissioned a poem owed the poet fair remuneration. Simonides’ professional policy gave rise to many anecdotes about his greed. The most famous in antiquity concerned a poem he was commissioned to write for Scopas of Thessaly. When Simonides delivered the poem, Scopas paid him only half the sum they had agreed on, telling him to get the rest from the Dioscuri, to whose praise the poet had devoted much of the poem. During the banquet at the palace to celebrate Scopas’s victory, Simonides was summoned outside at the request of two young men; when he went outside, the young men were gone. When the palace then collapsed and he alone survived, he realized that the young men had been the Dioscuri. Having insisted on being paid and having been credited with the invention of a (lost) method of memorization, Simonides can be seen as a precursor of the 5th-century Sophists.
In 1992 new papyrus fragments of his elegies were published; among them are parts of a long composition on the battle of Plataea (479 bc), in which the decisive role of the Spartans is emphasized. The fragments also include pederastic works and poems that were of the type meant for symposia (dinner parties).
Ethics
Simonides requires no standard of lofty unswerving rectitude. "It is hard," he says (Fr. 5),
- to become a truly good man, perfect as a square in hands and feet and mind, fashioned without blame. Whosoever is bad, and not too wicked, knowing justice, the benefactor of cities, is a sound man. I for one will find no fault with him, for the race of fools is infinite. ... I praise and love all men who do no sin willingly; but with necessity even the gods do not contend.
Virtue, he tells us elsewhere in language that recalls Hesiod, is set on a high and difficult hill (Fr. 58); let us seek after pleasure, for "all things come to one dread Charybdis, both great virtues and wealth" (Fr. 38).
Yet Simonides is far from being a hedonist; his morality, no less than his art, is pervaded by that virtue for which Ceos was renowned — self-restraint. His most celebrated fragment is a dirge, in which Danaë, adrift with the infant Perseus on the sea in a dark and stormy night, takes comfort from the peaceful slumber of her babe. Simonides here illustrates his own saying that "poetry is vocal painting, as painting is silent poetry," a formula that (through Plutarch's De Gloria Atheniesium) became Horace's famous "ut pictura poesis."
Method of loci
The method of loci was said to be invented by Simonides. According to De Oratore by Cicero, Simondies escaped a disaster that destroyed the building where he was having dinner with other dignitaries. He was able to recall the each victim by their positioning around the table.
Translations
- This entry is adapted from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
Of the many English translations of this poem, one of the best is that by J.A. Symonds in Studies on the Greek Poets. Fragments in T. Bergk, Poetae lyrici Graeci; standard edition by F.W. Schneidewin (1835) and of the Danae alone by H.L. Ahrens (1853). Other authorities are given in the exhaustive treatise of E. Cesati, Simonide di Ceo (1882); see also W. Schroter, De Simonidis Cei melici sermone (1906).
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