Heroic Historiography: Simonides and Herodotus on Plataea

Poxy 3965 offers a tantalizing glimpse of a kind of poetry virtually unknown to us before: encomiastic narrative elegy that celebrates contemporary historical events. In revealing this genre, Simonides' "Plataea elegy" raises new questions about the relationships among epic, elegy, and historiography in the early fifth century. In this poem, the heroic, epic past—including the death of Achilles and sack of Troy—evidently provides a paradigm for recent events.¹ So too, the poet who conferred undying kleos upon the Greeks at Troy serves as a model (or rival) for the present poet, who aspires to glorify the participants in the battle just fought (fir. 11.15-28).

Full of surprises as it is, Simonides' elegy has close connections to several familiar genres. Epic poetry obviously provides an important point of reference, helping to define both what that poem is and what it is not (cf. West 1993a, Clay, and particularly Stehle in this volume). So too do hymnic poetry (cf. Obbink in this volume), epinician, with its analogies between the contemporary athlete and heroic predecessors, and earlier historical elegies. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, texts such as the Plataea poem belong among the crowd-pleasing accounts of the past (including epic poetry, public funeral speeches, and Herodotus' Histories) that Thucydides rejects in favor of a non-mythodic (1.21-22).²

What about the poem's relation to the Histories? Unlike Thucydides, Herodotus was not writing contemporary history; he needed other accounts, oral or written, fixed or fluid, to tell him what happened two generations earlier. On chronological grounds, the newly-published elegy could have been among his sources,³ but its influence on the Histories is not immediately apparent.⁴ Divergent as they are, however, the two versions clearly have some bearing on each other, for Herodotus' account of Plataea proved to be the most fruitful resource for both Parsons and West in reconstructing and ordering the fragments of the new elegy. The question of Herodotus' relationship to the Plataea elegy has not yet been examined systematically; this paper takes a step toward that goal. My aim is not only further delineation of Herodotus' varied sources, but also better understanding of how public memory of the great events of the Persian War was shaped and transmitted during the fifth century.⁵

Part I of this essay asks how plausible it is that Herodotus might have known and used such an account. In the second section, I look at possible convergences between the Simonidean elegy and Herodotus' later account of the battle. Finally, Part III considers some important distinctions between the two accounts, especially in terms of the purpose or function they fulfill.

I

The Plataea elegy evidently became famous soon after its composition and remained so through the Alexandrian period and beyond. Rutherford notes (this volume, ad fr. 11.12, 19) that several extant Athenian tragedies allude to the elegy. Moreover, these echoes occur in relevant contexts. At Agamemnon 398 (accepting Blomfield's emendation ), context as well as diction closely parallel fr. 11.11-12: . "Justice destroys an evil mortal," declare the Aeschylean lyrics, a mortal such as Paris, who violated xenia. Euripides may also be echoing the Simonidean prooemium when his Iphigenia refers to her would-be husband Achilles obliquely as "son of Nereus' daughter" (IT 216), an unusual formulation highly reminiscent of fr. 11.19-20: .

If fifth-century poets could allude to the Plataea elegy in Trojan War contexts, a fortiori we would expect the elegy to influence poems about the Persian Wars themselves. Rutherford argues effectively that this was the case with Timotheus in his late fifth-century nome Persians, where the poet adopts an unusual relationship to his divine patron Apollo, similar to that constructed by Simonides with his Muse in fr. 11.21.⁶ Indeed, Stehle suggests that by the end of the century Choerilus found the Persian Wars all too well-worked by poets! Simonides' poems—on Marathon(?), Artemisium, Thermopylae, Salamis, as well as Plataea⁷—were probably the most famous examples, so famous that virtually all apparently contemporary poems on the Persian Wars...