The First Poets Read online

  Many of the poems possess genuinely Simonidean pathos, if we can use the term “genuine” in the context of Simonides. The epigrams are strong, patriotic little poems about sacrifices that ensure Greek freedom. Their “intact” survival, even where attribution is doubtful, give them an advantage over the fragments of longer poems: we can see a whole, clear and quite lucid intention behind each poem. In one of his own epitaphs, Simonides considers the fate of Megistus, who fell at Thermopylae. Simonides is said to have put the epitaph there “for the sake of friendship,” an unusual act for him:

  This tomb is his, glorious Megistus’, whom the Medes

  After fording the river Sperchius slew; a seer,

  He knew Death’s ghostly agents were approaching,

  Yet could not tear himself from his Spartan lords.12

  Simonides was in Athens at the time of Hipparchus (527–514), and shared him as patron with Lasus of Hermione and with Anacreon, rescued from Samos after the fall of Polycrates. Hipparchus left the day-to-day running of Athens to his elder brother Hippias while he, “frivolous, amorous and fond of the arts,” Aristotle says, detained his poets and other artists in Athens by means of generous fees.13 Simonides beat Lasus in a dithyramb or choral competition, a victory commemorated in a jest in Aristophanes’ Wasps. His Simonides took it all seriously but Lasus finally declared (had he lost?), “I don’t give a damn.”14 This is the same Lasus who is said to have caught out Onomacritos adding lines to Homer and inventing Orphic hymns and tattled to Hipparchus, who had him exiled.

  The question of Simonides’ character is an interesting one: was he posthumously caricatured and vilified or was he merely scheming and covetous? There must have been more to his personality than avarice, or he would not have commanded the respect (or the fees) that he did from wise and powerful men. Although in The Clouds Aristophanes has a character suggest that Simonides’ poem about the shearing of a ram (a pun on the name of a well-known athlete) was a cheerful sort of song, in Peace he makes the poet’s own name synonymous with avarice: “now that he’s old and wrinkly, he’d even put to sea on a field-gate to make some money.”15 The scholiast describes him as “the first to introduce money-grubbing into his art and to compose a poem for a fee.” He had two boxes, one full of money, the other empty, which he said was “full of favours.”16 Chamaeleon and Athenaeus agree, Athenaeus declaring that, “in Syracuse, when Hieron used to have him sent daily provisions, Simonides openly sold most of it and kept just a small bit for his own use. And, why? He said it was to show off Hieron’s generosity and his own frugality.”17 When Hieron’s wife asked him, “Which is better, to be wise or to be rich?” he replied, “Rich, for I see the wise spending their time at the rich man’s gates.”18

  There is little doubt that he amassed a fortune. An admiring anonymous epigram (conceivably written by himself) celebrates his material achievements as a poet and as a trainer of choruses with information that feels like fact:

  Fifty-six, Simonides,

  Bulls and tripods you won

  Before you affixed this tablet, fifty-six

  Times after coaching the chorus, delightful, of men

  You mounted noble Nike’s glittering chariot.19

  The glitter here seems like gold rather than reflected sunlight. One does not come to Simonides looking for a consistent poetic personality or a defined voice, for probity or high principle. He was no Solon, and none of the aristocratic integrity that we find in the poets of Lesbos, for example, or Teos, or Megara, adheres to him. Poetry is what he does. He has reached an accommodation with the world. Plutarch recounts how he went to Themistocles, his friend, a man renowned as a just arbiter and at the time fulfilling the role of strategos, or chief magistrate, to ask him to bend the law. Themistocles replied: “You’d be a poor singer if you played out of tune, and I a poor magistrate if I did folk favours against the law.”

  And yet, just as Simonides always sang in tune, but was adept at changing tune, so honest Themistocles was not entirely above reproach. He knew something about beauty, and what he knew corrupted him. He became a foe of the just, even-handed and conservative Aristides because both (if we believe the philosopher Ariston of Cos, and why shouldn’t we?) were in pursuit of the same lad, one Stesilaus from the island of Cos, Simonides’ own birthplace. The story does not have a happy ending: Themistocles had Aristides “banished by ostracism.” He also put to death, legend says, a Persian messenger demanding Athenian submission because, though a barbarian, he dared to use the Greek language to convey his message, and such appropriation of Homer’s medium by a foreigner proved a capital offence.

  There can be no doubt that Simonides’ fame and prosperity had much to do with the protection and encouragement of Hipparchus and, by extension, of his brother Hippias. Distasteful, then, to find him writing, once democracy was his new paymaster,

  On the day Hipparchus was slain by Harmodius and Aristo-giton, Athens was awash with radiance.20

  The lines, which Bowra cannot bring himself to believe are by Simonides, were carved into the base of a monument sculpted by Critius and Nesiotes around 477 BC, to celebrate the murderers. Two further lines followed, but they have been mutilated almost beyond interpretation. Campbell speculates: did they declare that the assassins “made their native land (democratic)”? The fee for the inscription, if it is by Simonides, was sufficient to buy off his residual gratitude to his now dead patron; or perhaps it was just a measure of how far times had changed.

  But there is a weight of testimony against Simonides the man. Anaxilas, tyrant of Rhegion, the winner of a mule race, Aristotle says, offered Simonides a modest fee for an epinicean poem. He declined, as if to say he couldn’t versify the achievements of a mule. But when a large fee was proffered, he immediately struck up with the words, “Hail to you, daughters of thunder-shod steeds!”21 Yet, as Aristotle comments, they were also daughters of donkeys.22 Was Simonides an ironist? It is possible: he was closer to irony than Pindar ever came. But it is unlikely that he would have exercised irony when fulfilling even so coarse a commission.

  Among the epitaphs attributed to him is one to a much-loved Thessalian hound.23 The language used in it is similar to—undistinguishable from—what he would have used in addressing the memory of a human being, or celebrating a goddess. It does not feel like a parody. So strong were the conventions, so earnest the respect for verse, that irony was out of the question, though Simonides was not above sarcasm when he felt it was called for. Other conventions were less binding, for example details of myth. The editor Aristophanes of Byzantium reflects on how Simonides sometimes calls Europa’s abductor a bull, but sometimes uses one or other of two words which mean sheep or goat. Europa and the goat? Something gets lost in translation.24

  Simonides is the first poet for whom we have relatively firm dates. He was born in 556 BC on the Dodecanese island of Cos, fifteen miles south-east of the Turkish coast, the closest mainland city being Halicarnassus. Cos is twenty-eight miles long and quite narrow, severely mountainous at one end and rocky throughout. It is a place rich in grapes, watermelons, oil, cereals, vegetables, and nowadays, tobacco. It also produces the eponymous lettuce. It is singularly unflat, and horses and oxen did not thrive there, a point which Pindar and Bacchylides both make in their verse. Still, fertile and well watered, it possessed numerous healthy springs. The physician Hippocrates was born there, and there he died at the age of 104.

  Cos was rather a strict, morally conservative island at the time of Simonides, lacking the brothels and pretty girls playing wind instruments that Polycrates brought to Samos to honour the goddess and perform more conventional duties. There may have been a rather (early) Spartan atmosphere, a becoming severity at a time when other cities were beginning to discover the joys of excess, when Persian manners, scents and movements were debasing established Greek norms. Herodotus calls the people of Cos “an Ionian people from Attica,” giving the impression that they belong to both sides of the Aegean at once.

  An i
mportant island with still significant ports, Cos is on a line between the port of Athens and the Dardanelles. Among its towns, one set inland out of the reach of pirates, Iulis, had more than its fair share of distinguished sons. Strabo reminds us that not only Simonides, but also his nephew and disciple Bacchylides, Erasistratus, and Ariston the peripatetic philosopher were all born there. He says that the law required every native, on attaining the age of sixty, to poison himself. No wonder Simonides, who was destined to live as much as thirty years beyond the allotted time, left home and stayed away, eventually dying half a world away, in Sicily.25

  Apollo was the patron of Cos and Iulis in particular, and the city kept a hostel on Delos and sent boy-choruses to sing hymns to Apollo there. The legendary Aristaeus, tamer of bees, would-be seducer of Eurydice,26 was also zealously worshipped: he saved the island from parching pestilence by bringing the etesian winds, which still blow for about forty days a year from the north-west, making the days bearable. And Dionysus was not neglected: how could he have been, given the centrality of the wine industry in the island’s ecology and economy. Theocritus spent time in Cos as a disciple of the native poet Philetas, whose works have perished. His seventh Idyll is set on a formalised Cos.27 By that time it was under the aegis of the Ptolemies.

  Simonides’ father was Leoprepes—he is one of those rare early poets with only one candidate for paternity. The child was nicknamed Melicertes, the meli meaning “honey”: honey-tongued. His career may have begun as a composer and chorus master of Cean boys, competing at religious festivals.28 He is also credited by the Suda with inventing long vowels (eta to lengthen epsilon, omega to lengthen omicron) and the double consonants xi and psi. He composed in the Doric dialect. In order to recite himself and to instruct his charges in recitation, he devised an “art of mnemonics” which, according to Longinus, consisted of association and was hardly a coherent system, though he makes much of it.29 When he was eighty, his memory was still phenomenal, like Sophocles’. Not everyone was keen to acquire his skills. Themistocles, Cicero says, when Simonides promised that he would coach him in mnemonics, replied, “I’d rather acquire a technique to forget, since I remember what I’d prefer not to remember, and I can’t forget what I’d prefer to forget.”30

  A few Simonidean fragments may date from his formative years in Cos.31 Those that lack restraint in the vehemence of their hyperboles may be apprentice-work. One, for example, compares the young boxer Glaucus to Heracles and to Polydeuces. The intention must be gently parodic; otherwise the poet displays considerable poetic hubris, or there has been a profound shift in religious sensibility within a very short period of time.32 We can place little weight on authorities for dating, and even arguing from internal evidence is difficult since so few extended passages of verse survive. It is clear that he knew the poetry of Stesichorus. His first major success came in the composition of epinicean poems for the major games, the Olympian (established in 776 BC), Pythian (588 BC), Isthmian (582 BC), and Nemean (573 BC). Victories in any of those games, quite apart from providing the athlete with a personal triumph, reflected on the city, and a poet was commissioned by a leader or a city or a father or uncle to celebrate an athlete and a place in the same breath.33

  As the form developed, it became an established feature in the athletic calendar and the poetic economy. The epinicean ode, Bowra says, grew into something “serious and stately; it assumed characteristics which had hitherto belonged to the hymn; it told instructive and illuminating stories; it contained aphorisms on man’s relations with the gods. All these can be found in Pindar’s Odes, and we cannot doubt that Simonides did something to prepare the way for them.”34 The twelfth-century grammarian Eustathius reports that Pindar was a pupil of Simonides and in age fitted in between the master and his nephew Bacchylides. Simonides stands in relation to Pindar rather as Gower does to Chaucer or Ben Jonson to Shakespeare, a large figure in the shadow of a giant.

  Gower and Jonson survive abundantly, Simonides does not. Bowra risks a few general points. Simonides “seems to have been gayer and more light-hearted than Pindar.”35 He expresses more enthusiasm, his allusions are less far-fetched and more direct in their impact. He is less concerned with hubris, more with achievement. He is also sometimes vividly circumstantial rather than categorical: he will state the season and tell how the weather breaks across the poem; for Pindar what matters is the general contrast. Simonides can be playful in ways quite alien to Pindar. The ram-shearing poem may have been an anti-nicean ode, one deriding a loser rather than praising a winner, an equally remunerable sort of task. Pindar is not above chiding a loser (Pythian VIII, 86–87), but always in the context of magnifying the victor.

  Among the apophthegms attributed to Simonides are two which have particular relevance in this connection: “the word is the image [eikon] of the thing”—a refreshingly anti-theoretical statement; and “he calls painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks.”36 How might such views be applied to actual composition? To begin with, in the rendering of descriptive detail. Discussing the Iliad, the scholiast notes: “phrix, ‘ripple,’ is the beginning of a rising wind. Simonides in an attempt to represent it said, ‘the breeze comes stippling the sea.”’37 A quest for appropriate words is apparent in some of Simonides’ precisions. “And from beside the wheel dust rose high in the air.”38 The wagoner with two ill-matched horses struggles so as not to “drop from his clenched hands the crimson thongs.”39 Theseus, about to go after the Minotaur, promises his father a red sail if he comes home safely: “a crimson sail dyed with the moist flower of the sturdy holmoak.”40 There is “The girl breathing / Words from her crimson lips.”41

  At night, “when nightingales, bubbling, green- / Necked, spring’s birds”42 are heard, sometimes we hear too the “herald of sweet-breathed spring,” the “blue-black swallow.”43 Another bird is the “sweet-voiced cock.”44 Another blue is the “blue-prowed” ship.45 Precision is crucial if the poet is to enact his meanings, as in one of his most celebrated poems:

  You’re human, so never say that this,

  that or this other will occur tomorrow, never

  when a rich man passes say he’ll be rich until …

  swifter’s change than dragonfly flicks wing.46

  This specific precision leads Dionysus of Halicarnassus to declare that Simonides surpasses Pindar in diction and in the way he combines words: “he expresses pity not by exploiting a heightened style but by appealing to the feelings.” This is why Catullus invokes him: “send me a morsel of consolation, more sad than Simonides’ tears.”47 Quintilian agrees: “his chief merit … lies in the power to excite pity.”

  “The word is the image of the thing.” For Simonides, words actually evoke objects, conjure them in mind, and are in this sense “iconic.” This is why painting is silent poetry, poetry speaking painting: there is a level of aesthetic equivalence between a dragonfly, its painted image and its verbal depiction. Simonides attempts to make things alive to the senses. Colour, sudden movement, the very things that make the image clear and defined in the eye, have verbal equivalents. The epigrams, while more generalised, drive home with an analogous precision.

  The pithy statements in Pindar can seem trite; those in Simonides, as in Solon, detach and “make sense out of context because of their directness and the precision of his metaphors.”48 None of the attributed apophthegms bears any relation to the surviving poems and fragments, “but the character of his observations retains some sense of the character of his style.”

  The deep erosion of his work may have begun early. “Since stories about Simonides were told as early as the fifth century, and relatively few citations of his lyric verse survive, it would seem that by the fourth century the poet’s biography had become more interesting and accessible than much of his po-etry.”49 That biography is more vivid than most, but no less uncertain; the legends that grew around it are “representative,” rather than merely fictional.

  When he was in his late twenties and a
lready known as a poet, Simonides was summoned to Athens by Hipparchus. His task, which he fulfilled with assiduity, included the composition of state epitaphs. The one about Hippias’ daughter, on her tomb in Lampsacus, is thrifty and brilliant:50

  Under this dust is Archedice, Hippias’ daughter;

  In his day in Greece he was chief of men.

  He, her husband, brother, her two sons were tyrants;

  She never let her heart swell with conceit.

  He stayed in Athens until his patron was murdered in 514 BC and Hippias was exiled four years later. He went then to Thessaly, practising his art in various cities and securing patronage from the Aleudae, Scopadae and other rulers, though perhaps retaining close contact with Athens. He composed some of his memorable work in Thessaly. He stayed with Echecratidas, the tagos, or “king of kings,” in Thessaly, living in Crannon, between Larissa and Pharsalus; there was a hot spring near there, and when its waters were mixed with wine, the wine retained the warmth for several days.

  Echecratidas’ son Antiochus died young, and Simonides dirged him. This dirge came to be regarded as a classic measure of dirges. He wrote another dirge for the Scopadae. This is the legend behind that commission.51 During a banquet, Simonides recited a poem celebrating the Scopadae, but also speaking extensively about Castor and Polydeuces. The host declared that he would pay only half the agreed fee: the poet could secure the remainder from the Dioscuri. Suddenly the poet was summoned out of the banqueting hall by two young men, and just as he left the building the roof fell in and crushed his hosts and the rest of their guests. Only he lived to tell the tale and to identify the two young men: Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioscuri themselves, brought the house down. Simonides was called to identify the corpses. Thanks to his mnemonic system, he could remember the seating, or reclining, plan. This story is probably Hellenistic in origin.52 Bowra believes Theocritus told it to show that the Scopades’ investment in Simonides was worthwhile because without the poems he composed they, their wealth and horses, would all have been forgotten. (The fact that the victims might have survived does not seem to weigh in the balance.) Later writers reflect that, had the story been true, Simonides himself would have made much of it: what a selling point, what a justification for top fees.53