The Hymnic Structure of the New Simonides

Among recent papyrological finds, a portion of identifiably Simonidean elegy preserved on papyrus from Oxyrhynchus¹ is almost without parallel in its potential for reorienting our thinking about early Greek poetry. The tale is a familiar one: a fragmentary ancient manuscript overlaps with another, previously known, but unidentified, and with two quotations in ancient authors. Out of the composite, a new poem can almost be said to exist. The cost for us is that difficulties are "raised in places where there were none."² Plutarch, who quotes several distichs, supplies an author and subject. The two papyrus MSS (POxy 3965 and 2327) provide us with two different copies of the poem,³ preserving in all over one hundred completely or partially preserved lines of elegy, which uniquely combine features of Pindaric encomium, Homeric phraseology, sub-epic narrative technique, and Tyrtaean battle themes to recount and memorialize an historical event of considerable military and political importance.

For this reason the new fragments of Simonides' poem on the battle at Plataea augment in an unexpected way our corpus of early Greek celebratory poetry. Scarcely more than five years earlier, E. L. Bowie had posited the existence of just such a class of early Greek elegy as distinct from sympotic elegy.⁴ I argue that the new fragment confirms Bowie's suspicions, with a new twist: the epic elegy turns out to be introduced by a prooemial hymn to a divinity. On the other hand, such a structure (prooimion + nomos + sphragis), which smacks of later Hellenistic genre-crossing,⁵ turns out not to be so very alien to early Greek rhapsodic poetry, as I will try to show. First I set forth the basic structure of the poem, as far as it can be discerned from the new fragments.

I

A highly mythologizing opening masks the poem's ultimate subject at the beginning of our largest fragment of the poem (POxy 2327, fr. 5 + 6 + 27 col. 1 + 3965, fr. 1 + 2). At the very point at which this fragment first begins, under discussion is the funeral of Achilles: (lines 2–3). Patroclus is mentioned (line 7) and Achilles is being addressed; this much is certain from the parting salutation to the son of Thetis at line 19, giving rise to West's restorations of 7–8:

It is unclear whether this refers to the death of Achilles, or rather to that of Patroclus. In addition to the parallels cited by Parsons (1992a.29), cf. Il. 16.849 (the dying Patroclus to Hector): . But West argues on the basis of the prominence of Achilles in this section that Apollo should figure here for the death of Achilles himself. (Parsons compares Il. 19.416f., 22.359, noting that Achilles' death is certainly alluded to in line 18.)

In lines 10–12 Priam is named, and Paris too, as a result of whose actions the "chariot of divine justice" ( ) reaches its destined goal: the sack the city (13–14). At this point the poet assures us of the fame which their poet conferred on these short-lived heroes (15–18), bids a fond farewell to his subject Achilles (19), and employs a transitional formula familiar from the Homeric hymns to invoke his "Muse of many names" and lead over to a new theme (20–24): the engagement at Plataea (25ff.). When the time comes there will be on the battlefield (at least in the preserved fragments) no killing and stabbing, no sacking of cities, no chariot of divine justice pursuing her allotted course: but there is no dearth of praise for heroized mortals and no lack of connection implied between the heroic death immortalized by Homer and those fallen at Plataea whom the poem memorializes.

II

          And after they sacked the city into infamy, for home                    did the illustrious leading Greek heroes set forth.15      On their heads is shed undying fame by the power of a man                    who received from the violet-tressed Pierides          all truthfulness, who made a lasting name, among those to come,                    for the generation of demigods, swift to its doom.          But fare ye well now...