Simonides

Simonides, a celebrated Greek lyric poet, was born at Iulis, in the island of Ceos, in the year 556 B.C. He repaired to Athens on the invitation of Hipparchus, and after his death took up his residence in Thessaly, under the patronage of the Aleuadae and Scopadae, who appear to have treated him in a very niggardly fashion. Shortly before the invasion of Greece by the Persians he returned to Athens, and devoted his poetic powers to celebrating the heroes and the battles of that momentous struggle in elegies, epigrams, and dirges. He carried off the prize, even from Æschylus, for the elegy on the heroes that fell at Marathon. He won as many as fifty-six times in these poetical contests. He spent his last ten years at the court of Hiero of Syracuse, where he died in 468. Simonides appears to have scandalised his contemporaries by writing for hire; and his great rival Pindar accuses him, apparently not without good reason, of excessive avarice. He brought to perfection the elegy and epigram, and excelled in the dithyramb and trimphal ode; he seems also to have invented the art of artificial memory. The characteristics of his poetry are sweetness (whence his surname of Melicertes), polish combined with simplicity, genuine pathos, and power of expression, although in originality he is much inferior to his contemporary Pindar. The best editions of his fragments are those of Schneidewin (1835) and Bergk (Poetæ lyriæ Græci, vol. 2).—Simonides of Ceos must be carefully distinguished from the iambic poet SIMONIDES of Amorgos, who flourished about 660 B.C.