Short answers, pulled from the story.
Simonides of Ceos was a Greek lyric poet who lived from around 556 to 468 BC, born in Ioulis on the island of Ceos. He was included by scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria in the canonical list of nine lyric poets considered worthy of critical study, and is credited with pioneering the victory ode and establishing the choral dirge as a recognised poetic form.
The method of loci is a mnemonic system that assigns memories to specific spatial locations so they can be recalled in sequence. Simonides is traditionally credited with developing it after being called out of a banquet hall moments before it collapsed; he identified the crushed and unrecognisable bodies of the dead by remembering where each guest had been seated. The system remained widely used in oral societies until the Renaissance.
The Roman rhetorician Quintilian, writing in the first century AD, described Simonides as having a simple style commendable for the aptness of his language and a certain charm. He argued that Simonides' chief merit lay in his power to excite pity, and that some preferred him in this respect to all other writers of the genre.
Simonides composed epitaphs for Athenians, Spartans, and Corinthians who died in the Persian Wars, a commemorative song for Leonidas and his men, a dedicatory epigram for Pausanias, and longer poems on the battles of Artemisium, Salamis, and Plataea. A substantial fragment comparing Pausanias to Achilles, describing events before the Battle of Plataea, survives as genuine narrative elegy in elegiac meter.
Ancient sources, including Aristophanes, Athenaeus, and Aristotle, portrayed Simonides as the first poet to charge fees for his services and to treat poetry as a commercial enterprise. Stories circulated that he sold provisions given to him by Hieron of Syracuse, kept a box full of money and an empty one for favours, and refused a commission until the fee was raised.
Simonides was buried outside Acragas in Sicily, according to the Hellenistic poet Callimachus. Callimachus also reported that Simonides' tombstone was later misused in the construction of a tower, a detail Callimachus incorporated into his poem Aetia, where Simonides appears as a ghost complaining about the desecration.