The New Simonides: Contexts of Praise and Desire (review)

In JHS 1997, commenting on the Derveni Papyrus, Glenn Most says the following: "Reading it and supplementing it require a rare combination of ingenuity, erudition and foolhardiness." The same can certainly be said of the "New Simonides," elegiac poetry assembled from the combination of two fragmentary papyri from Oxyrhynchus (POxy 2327 and POxy 3965). When it was discovered that the two papyri overlapped in two places and that some verses of POxy 3965 were attributed to Simonides in Plutarch and Stobaeus, the authorship of the text was secured. The newly combined text has launched a scholarly feeding frenzy since the editio princeps of POxy 3965 appeared in 1992, edited by P. J. Parsons. Martin West in the same year produced IEG², in which he published the new text (as fragments 1-22), offering substantial supplements. Two years later a lively panel at the meeting of the American Philological Association in Atlanta considered the "New Simonides," and the papers appeared four years later in a special issue of Arethusa (1996, 29:2). Deborah Boedeker and David Sider, two of the participants in the 1994 panel, have now produced a volume of essays that updates and expands the earlier publication, carrying forward questions about the text that have engaged some of the best minds working on Greek poetry in the last two decades.

Although much of the text of the "New Simonides" is still fragmentary, it appears that the poetry falls into two types within the elegiac genre, convivial and narrative. Much of the excitement has been aroused by the latter type (historical elegy), known heretofore in the tradition only indirectly, its features described by Bowie in JHS 1986 based on allusions alone. Now we have some one hundred forty lines of text, drawn from Simonides' account of battles in the final phase of the war against the Persians. Forty-three (extremely fragmentary) verses appear to belong to the poet's description of a naval battle, likely the one at Artemisium. The rest (with considerable restoration, principally by Lobel, Parsons, and West) contain a description of events belonging to the Battle of Plataea in 479 B.C.E., assembled in West's IEG² as fragment 11. The poem was clearly well known in antiquity, and we find echoes in other authors from the Classical to the Roman period. The narrative is preceded by a hymnic prooimion in which several elements suggest that Achilles is the focus. There is a reference to Patroclus (if Luppe/West's completion of with is correct, 6) and to Thetis (assuming it is she, mother of the hero, who is to be inferred from the genitives and of 19-20). This prompted Lobel's supplements in 19 of and , accepted by West, making it an apostrophe to Achilles, an invocation following the narrative of the hero's death, preceding a second invocation to the Muse to assist in his report of the 479 battle.

This text continues with a muster of the troops. One of the most striking features of the historical part of the poem as we now have it is the fact that it focuses on the Spartan participation, with the name of their leader, Pausanias, secure in the papyrus (34). The Corinthians' presence is indicated in the verses that follow, along with the presence of troops from the Isthmus and Megara. The Athenian role has survived more precariously, with Parson's supplements in 41 and 42 ( and ), indicating, if correctly restored, no more than that the Persians were driven out of Attica. This account (as it stands) is consistent with Aeschylus' in Persians 817, which describes Plataea as . It differs dramatically, however, from the record of the battle by Herodotus, composed a half-century later in Athens. Herodotus is quick to highlight the Athenian role in the Greek victory, and his report reflects the fact that Pausanias had fallen from favor two years after the victory (Thucydides 1.95). The Pan-Hellenic coalition...