See Bergk, Poetae Lyrici Graeci, vol. ii., Leipsic, 1882, pp. 441- 459. There is a translation in English verse of part of the poem on women in Mure’s Hist. of Gr. Lit., iii. p. 181.

SIMONIDES of Ceos (556-469 b.c.), one of the greatest poets and most accomplished men of antiquity, was born at Iulis in the island of Ceos, 556 b.c. Few poetic natures have ever been planted in more congenial soil. His native island was devoted to the worship of Apollo, the god of song; poetry had been cultivated in his family for generations; his youth coincided with the period succeeding the first great burst of Aeolian and Doric lyric poetry; his manhood saw the heroic struggle with Persia, when Greece first awoke to the consciousness of her national unity; and he died before the inevitable disintegration had begun. Among his friends were all the foremost men of the day,—kings and princes like Hipparchus and Hiero and the Aleuadae and Scopadae, statesmen like Pausanias and Themistocles, and poets like Aeschylus, Epicharmus, and his own nephew Bacchylides. Pindar alone among his contemporaries seems to have depreciated Simonides, perhaps not without a touch of jealousy; by all the rest he was revered as the poet laureate of emancipated Greece. He lived for the most part with his friends, whose praises he had sung for money; we hear of him at the court of Hipparchus in Athens, with the Scopadae in Thessaly, and finally at the court of Hiero of Syracuse, where he died in 469 b.c.

His reputation as a man of learning and ingenuity is shown by the tradition that he added two new letters to the alphabet—η and ω—the truth being probably that he was one of the first authors to use these symbols, before the archonship of Euclides. So unbounded were his popularity and influence that he was felt to be a power even in the political world; we are told that he reconciled Thero and Hiero on the eve of a battle between their opposing armies. For his poems he could command almost any price: later writers, from Aristophanes onwards, accuse him of avarice, probably not without some reason. From the numerous anecdotes preserved about him we see that he was what we should infer from his poems, a genial and courtly man, “dwelling with flowers,—like the bee, seeking yellow honey” (Fr. 47), yet not without a vein of gentle irony. 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.”

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 ninety fragments of lyric 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 Thermopylae are the most celebrated. In the private epigrams there is more warmth of colour and feeling, but here it is hard to decide which are genuine and which spurious; few of them rest on any better authority than that of the Palatine anthology. One interesting and undoubtedly genuine epigram of this class is upon Archedice, the daughter of Hippias the Pisistratid, 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, and celebrates those who fell at Thermopylae; another is an ode in honour of Scopas; the rest represent odes on victors in the games, hyporchemes, dirges, hymns to the gods, and other varieties. The poem on Thermopylae is reverent and sublime, breathing an exalted patriotism and a lofty national pride; the others are full of tender pathos and deep feeling, such as evoked from Catullus the line "Maestius lacrimis Simonideis,” with a genial worldliness befitting one who had “seen the towns and learnt the mind of many men.” For 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), and “what life of mortal man, or what dominion, is to be desired apart from pleasure, without which even the gods’ existence is not to be envied” (Fr. 71). 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— σωφροσύνη or self-restraint. His most celebrated fragment, and one of the most exquisite and touching remains of ancient poetry, is a dirge, in which Danae, 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” (one of the opening remarks in Lessing’s Laocoon) : from the picture of the sleeping child, standing out as if in relief against the background of surging waves, and Danae in tears, we can well understand how Longinus should have commended this power of vivid presentation as a distinguishing feature in another of Simonides’s poems. This poem has been often translated. One of the best translations is that by Symonds, in the first series of his Studies on the Greek Poets.

See Bergk, Pοet∙χ Lyrici Graeci, vol. iii., Leipsic, 1882, pp. 382-535. Weicker was the first who clearly separated the fragments of the Cean Simonides from those of his namesake. Sterling (Essays and Tales, vol. i. pp. 188 sq.) has a poetical translation of most of them.