Simonides of Ceos - Biography, Poetry, Ethics, Translations

Poet, born in Iulis on the island of Ceos. He travelled extensively, and lived many years in Athens. When Persia invaded Greece he devoted his powers to celebrating the heroes and the battles of that struggle in elegies, epigrams, odes, and dirges, and is noted for his famous epitaph on the three hundred who fell at Thermopylae. He was believed to be the first Greek poet who wrote for fees.

Simonides of Ceos (ca.

Biography

During his youth he taught poetry and music, and composed paeans for the festivals of Apollo. 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. His patron, Scopas, reproached him at a banquet for devoting too much space to the Dioscuri in an ode celebrating Scopas' victory in a chariot-race. Scopas refused to pay all the fee and told Simonides to apply to the Dioscuri for the remainder. Shortly afterwards, Simonides was told that two young men wished to speak to him; 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 reputation as a man of learning is shown by the tradition that he introduced the distinction between the long and short vowels (ε, η, ο, ω), 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; 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;

Poetry

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. (keimetha tois keinon rhémasi peithomenoi.)

which may be translated as:

Tell the Spartans, passer-by, here, obediently, we lie.

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.

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;

The poem on Thermopylae is reverent and sublime, breathing an exalted patriotism and a lofty national pride;

Ethics

For Simonides requires no standard of lofty unswerving rectitude.

Virtue, he tells us elsewhere in language that recalls Hesiod, is set on a high and difficult hill (Fr.

Yet Simonides is far from being a hedonist; 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."

Translations

Of the many English translations of this poem, one of the best is that by J.A.

This entry is adapted from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.