Simonides of Ceos

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Simonides of Ceos lived from around 556 to 468 BC, and the Greeks credited him with something no poet before him had managed: convincing the world that an ordinary human being deserved the kind of praise once reserved only for gods and heroes. That alone would be a remarkable legacy. But Simonides was also reputed to be a greedy miser, a miraculous survivor of a collapsing banquet hall, the inventor of a memory system still in use today, and a man who could define the texture of a dragonfly's wing in a single compound word.

  The Roman rhetorician Quintilian, writing in the first century AD, placed his finger on what made Simonides unusual among ancient poets: not grandeur, not complexity, but the power to excite pity. Quintilian judged that some preferred him in that respect to all other writers in his genre. How did a poet from a small island in the Cyclades become one of the nine lyric poets that scholars in Hellenistic Alexandria considered worthy of serious study? And how did a man associated above all with the solemn dead manage to earn a reputation as one of the wittiest, most commercially shrewd figures of the ancient Greek world?

• 2. The Island and the Tyrant

  ›

  Ioulis, the town where Simonides was born on the island of Ceos, stood about fifteen miles south-east of Attica. Ceos was the outermost island of the Cyclades; its near neighbour Delos, the innermost, was the reputed birthplace of Apollo. The people of Ceos regularly sent choirs to Delos to perform hymns in the god's honour, and another Cean town, Carthaea, maintained a choregeion, a school where choirs were trained. This musical infrastructure almost certainly shaped the young poet.

  Ceos also had a notable athletic tradition, particularly in running and boxing. The names of islanders who won at Panhellenic competitions were recorded on stone slabs at Ioulis. The grandfather of Simonides' nephew Bacchylides was among the island's celebrated athletes. That combination of choral performance and athletic pride gave Simonides the raw material for a poetic form he would make his own: the victory ode.

  Around the age of thirty, the pull of a larger stage drew him to Athens, to the court of Hipparchus, a tyrant who supported the arts. There he trained choruses and composed poetry alongside another chorus-trainer, Lasus of Hermione. The rivalry between the two became a standing joke among later Athenians, and the comic playwright Aristophanes used Simonides as a byword for a certain type: the mercenary professional poet. When Hipparchus was assassinated in 514 BC, Simonides left Athens and moved north, into a very different world.

• 3. Thessaly and the Collapsing Roof

  ›

  Thessaly was perceived by most Greeks of the period as a cultural backwater. Simonides himself, according to an account by Plutarch, once dismissed the Thessalians as too ignorant to be beguiled by poetry. Yet he spent a significant stretch of his career there, under the protection of the Scopadae and the Aleuadae, two of the most powerful families in the Thessalian feudal aristocracy.

  The head of the Scopadae, a man named Scopas, was fond of drinking, convivial company, and vain displays of wealth. He commissioned Simonides to write a victory ode for a boxer. The poet packed the ode with references to Castor and Pollux, the mythical twins who served as heroic archetypes of the boxer. Scopas, displeased at sharing the spotlight with divine figures, told Simonides to collect half his fee from the twins themselves, since he would only pay the other half.

  Both Cicero and Quintilian preserve what happened next. At a banquet celebrating the victory, Simonides was called outside by a message that two young men were waiting for him. When he stepped out, he found no one there. Seconds later, the dining hall collapsed behind him, killing Scopas and a number of his relatives. The two mysterious visitors were understood to be Castor and Pollux, repaying the poet's devotion with his life.

  The aftermath gave the story a second layer. Simonides was asked to help identify the dead; their bodies had been crushed beyond recognition. He reconstructed the identities by correlating each victim to the position they had occupied at the table before he left. From this grim task he drew out a general principle: that the mind can hold images in ordered spatial sequence, and that assigning memories to specific locations makes them retrievable. This became the method of loci, a mnemonic system that remained in widespread use through the Renaissance. Cicero records that when Simonides described the invention to Themistocles, the Athenian politician was unimpressed, replying that he would rather a technique of forgetting, since he remembered what he would rather not remember and could not forget what he would rather forget.

• 4. War, Glory, and Epitaphs

  ›

  The Persian Wars gave Simonides the largest stage of his career. After returning to Athens, he composed commemorative verses for virtually every major engagement of the conflict. He wrote epitaphs for Athenians, Spartans, and Corinthians, a commemorative song for Leonidas and his men at Thermopylae, a dedicatory epigram for the Spartan commander Pausanias, and poems on the battles of Artemisium, Salamis, and Plataea.

  The competition over who should memorialize the Athenian dead at Marathon is one of the more pointed anecdotes attached to his name. An anonymous biographer of the tragedian Aeschylus reports that the Athenians chose Simonides over Aeschylus to compose an epigram for the fallen, despite the fact that Aeschylus had fought at Marathon and his own brother had died there. The story holds that Aeschylus, wounded in pride, withdrew to the court of Hieron of Syracuse. Whether or not the account is accurate, it illustrates the esteem in which Simonides' skill at commemorative verse was held.

  A substantial fragment of a poem describing events leading up to the Battle of Plataea survives, comparing the Spartan commander Pausanias to Achilles. Modern scholars have identified this as genuine narrative elegy, confirming that Simonides composed sustained accounts of the wars in elegiac meter, not just short inscriptions. Yet the famous epitaph attributed to the Lacedaemonians at Thermopylae sits on shakier ground. Modern scholars generally consider only one attributed epigram to be unquestionably authentic: an inscription for the seer Megistias, quoted by Herodotus. Many other pithy verses have been credited to Simonides over the centuries in much the same way, as one scholar puts it, that wise sayings are attributed to Confucius.

• 5. The Miser and the Wit

  ›

  Aristophanes, in his play Peace, imagined the tragic poet Sophocles transformed into Simonides: old and decayed, but willing, for the right fee, to go to sea in a sieve. A scholiast commenting on the passage wrote that Simonides seemed to have been the first to introduce money-grabbing into his songs, composing verses for pay. The same scholiast read a line from one of Pindar's odes, about a time when the Muse was not yet fond of profit, as a covert attack on his older contemporary.

  The stories that cluster around this reputation are surprisingly specific. A popular tradition held that he kept two boxes: one empty for favours and one full for money. Athenaeus recorded that at the court of Hieron in Syracuse, Simonides sold most of the daily provisions the tyrant gave him, explaining that he did so so that all might see Hieron's magnificence and his own moderation. When Hieron's wife asked him whether it was better to be wealthy or wise, he reportedly answered: wealthy, because he could see the wise spending their days at the doors of the wealthy.

  A papyrus dating to around 250 BC preserves another exchange. Hieron asked whether everything grows old. Simonides answered: yes, all except money-making; and kind deeds age most quickly of all. Plutarch quotes him complaining in old age that it had robbed him of every pleasure but making money.

  Yet the same sources that build up this portrait of greed let slip a detail that complicates it. Herodotus records that Simonides paid for an inscription on a friend's epitaph out of his own pocket. And Herodotus also mentions an earlier poet, Arion, who had amassed a fortune in Italy and Sicily, raising the possibility that Simonides was not actually the first professional poet at all, as the Greeks themselves claimed.

• 6. Poetry and Its Afterlife

  ›

  Simonides composed across an unusually wide range of forms: victory odes, choral dirges, encomia, dithyrambs, hymns, paeans, and possibly others for which no record survives. He is generally credited with establishing the choral dirge as a recognised form of lyric poetry, and with inventing or at least popularising the victory ode as a genre. He is the earliest poet known to have expanded the dithyramb from songs dedicated to Dionysus into narrative accounts illustrating heroic myths; the geographer Strabo mentioned a dithyramb called Memnon, in which Simonides located the hero's tomb in Syria.

  An anonymous epigram from the Hellenistic period credited him with 57 victories in dithyrambic competitions, possibly all in Athens. In one surviving victory ode, celebrating the boxer Glaucus of Carystus, Simonides declared that not even Heracles or Polydeuces could have stood against him, a statement whose impiety struck even Lucian, many generations later, as remarkable.

  Practically nothing survives intact. Fragments come from papyrus finds and quotations preserved by ancient commentators. One complete lyric poem does exist: a long meditation on human goodness quoted in Plato's dialogue the Protagoras. In it, Simonides takes issue with a saying of Pittacus that being good is hard. He argues instead for a more forgiving standard: a man is good enough as long as he does nothing shameful willingly, and has the sense of right that does cities good. Not even the gods, the poem concludes, can fight necessity.

  The discovery of papyrus P.Oxy. 3965 added an unexpected dimension. Scholars had long characterised his poetry as purely public and professional. The new fragment shows him in a sympotic, intimate setting, speaking as an old man rejuvenated in the company of a lover. The sands of Egypt, as one scholar noted, may still have further discoveries to yield; excavations at Oxyrhynchus have continued for over a century and new fragments keep surfacing.

• 7. A Ghost in Acragas

  ›

  Simonides spent his final years in Sicily as a friend and confidant of Hieron of Syracuse. A scholiast on Pindar records that he once brokered peace between Hieron and Theron of Acragas, ending a war between the two Sicilian tyrants. The rivalry between Simonides and Pindar at Hieron's court is a persistent theme in ancient sources, with scholiasts arguing that it explains obscure passages in Pindar's victory odes. Whether the enmity was real or a later invention to give colour to the odes remains uncertain; Pindar scholiasts are generally considered unreliable.

  The Hellenistic poet Callimachus identified Simonides' burial place as a site outside Acragas, and reported that his tombstone had been misused in the construction of a tower. It is a fittingly ironic end for a man so associated with epitaphs. Callimachus rendered the scene through the poet's ghost, complaining about the desecration. The same image appears in Callimachus' Aetia.

  Enlightenment Europe remembered him through a different lens. Lessing called him the Greek Voltaire, a comparison that gestures at both his sharpness and his range. Plato placed him alongside Bias and Pittacus among the wise and blessed, while also grouping him with Homer and Hesiod as a forerunner of the sophist tradition. The saying attributed to him by Michael Psellos, that the word is the image of the thing, anticipates a debate about language and representation that continued for millennia. His remark, preserved by Plutarch, that painting is silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks was later recast by Horace in the phrase ut pictura poesis, a tag that shaped European aesthetic theory for centuries after.