SIMONIDES s7-mOn'i-dez (Lat., from Gk.
ItyoviOng) (B.c. 556-468). A Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Ceos. He was a finished literary craftsman in many forms of verse rather than a sublime or greatly original poet. His long life almost bridged the century from Pisistra tus to Pericles. and in his multifarious and wide ly dispersed literary activity lie represents the transition from the earlier parochial isolation of the Greek cantons to the cosmopolitan culture of the Sophistic enlightenment. His poetic career began with the guidance of Apolline choruses in his native isle. Thence he was called by rich gifts to the Court of Hipparehus at Athens, where he met Anacreon and competed with Lasus of Hermione, the teacher of Pindar. After the assassination of Hipparchus, he attached himself to the great ruling families of Thessaly, the Sect and the Aleuadm. His dirge in memory of Antiochns of Larissa was greatly admired. A strange poem in which he praises or apologizes for Scopas by 'debasing the moral currency' is analyzed and interpreted in Plato's Protagoras. He further displayed his detachment of mind by composing an epigram for the statue of Harmo dins in which the assassination of Hipparelms is greeted as 'a great light rising upon Athens.' Returning to Athens, now a democracy, he bore away the prize from _Esehylus with an elegy on the warriors who fell at Marathon. Two epigrams dating from the year B.C. 476 inform us that he won the prize for the dithyramb in that year, and that no man could vie in powers of memory with Simonides at the age of eighty. A year later we meet him in Sicily in the role of a mediator between Hiero and Theron. The re mainder of his life was probably spent chiefly at the Court of Hiero. He died about the year 46S.
Simonides wrote for many clients in a great variety of forms—epigrams, hymns, preans, skolia, epinikia, dithyrambs, hyporchemes (dance songs), threnoi (dirges). Though an Ionian. he
used the modified Do•ie traditional in these forms of the Dorian chloral lyric. To him, perhaps, after the initiative of Ibyens, may he attributed the full development of the eneomian and epini clan hymn in praise of living men in which the two other representatives of 'universal melic' won chief fame.
His main opportunity came with the Persian wars. He understood as no other how to crystal lize the sentiment of the great national crisis into flawless gems of epigram, fitting Memorials for the glorious dead of Thennopybe, Salamis, and Platma. Nothing is more truly Greek than these epigrams in their simple adequacy, their chaste reserve, their exquisite finish of form. Ruskin with pardonable exaggeration pronounces the inscription for those who fell at The•mopyle the most beautiful thing in the world: strange•, and tell the Laee(hemonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws." The 'tears of Simonides,' the pathos of his dirges, were prover bial. The English reader may form some notion of it from Milman's translation of the beautiful lament of Hama; exposed to the waves in a chest with her infant Perseus.
The vicissitudes of human destiny so amply exemplified in the century of history which lie witnessed evoke from Simonides a noble but somewhat conventional strain of melancholy moralizing. Fo• this 'criticism of life' Matthew Arnold ranks him with ..Eschylus, Pindar, and Sophoeles as a prophet of the 'imaginative rea son.' His style is chaste, polished, and unobtru sively rhetorical rather than profoundly imagina tive. The extant remains of his works may be found in Bergk's Lyric Poets or in the An thologia Lyrica of the Tenbne• texts.