The New Simonides: Towards a Commentary

The Text

The main sources are two papyri from Oxyrhynchus, both probably to be dated to the second century A.D. These are POxy 2327 and POxy 3965, which overlap with each other in two places. Simonidean authorship is established by two coincidences with passages of poetry otherwise attributed to Simonides by Plutarch and Stobaeus. The scribe of POxy 2327 is the same as that of POxy 2430, a collection of fragments of the Simonidean paeans and epinikia and perhaps other genres in lyric metres.¹

The papyri contained elegiac poems, some apparently military or historical in theme, others sympotic. It looks as if POxy 3965 represents a roll entirely devoted to elegiacs; the roll from which POxy 2327 comes may also have been all elegiacs, but if POxy 2327 is not wholly distinct from POxy 2430, it contained lyric poems as well. In the Hellenistic edition of Simonides, the principle of classification must have been in part by perceived genre, with sections for threnoi, dithyrambs, enkomia, epinikia, and paeans, perhaps kateukhai (537 PMG), and a miscellaneous category of summikta (540 PMG). The arrangement might have been one genre per book-roll, though that would depend on the number of poems assigned to each genre.² The Suda also says that there were epigrams, perhaps the so-called Sylloge Simonidea.³ How the elegiac poems were arranged is unclear. The Suda refers only to titles—the Xerxou Naumakhia and the Ep' Artemisioi Naumakhia. These and other poems might have been long enough to fill a whole book-roll on their own, but it seems more likely that they were at most a couple of hundred lines long, and that they were grouped in a book, or books, of elegies. Perhaps there were separate book-rolls for, say, historical and sympotic elegies. The epigrams, if they were included, perhaps formed a short appendix of a few hundred lines at the end of one of the books of elegies.⁴ The arrangement in the edition(s) represented in the papyri does not necessarily correspond to the arrangement in the Hellenistic edition, since a large papyrus, with tall columns of 40 lines, might have absorbed several Hellenistic books. One such large roll perhaps contained longer elegiac fragments, one contained lyrics.

Should we think of an anthology? That might be suggested by the fact that the overlaps between the two papyri are so great. It might be thought that the odds of this sort of coincidence are reduced if we postulate that the texts come from anthologies; there would be fewer poems in circulation, and the chance of more than one papyrus contributing to the same poem increases. However, the same result can be obtained if we postulate merely that some sections of the full editions were more popular than others; the elegies of Simonides might have been more popular than, say, his lyric threnoi.⁵

The papyrus is furnished with short scholia supplying variant readings (diorthoses), some from the Hellenistic commentators Apion and Nicanor.⁶ There are no signs of longer scholia. No beginnings or endings of poems are preserved, with the exception of POxy 2327, fr. 7 = 34 W², a small fragment with a marginal coronis and (perhaps) the last letter of a marginal title;⁷ otherwise, we have no information about employment of titles in either papyrus. Sigla in POxy 2327 include χ (marking points in the text deemed to be of special interest) and an inverted sign (of indeterminate meaning).⁸

To the inconvenience of the scholar, the fragments of Simonides are divided among a number of modern collections. For the elegiac fragments, we have West, IEG II² (= W²); for the lyric fragments, the standard text is Poetici Melici Graeci (PMG); and for the epigrams, Simonidean and Pseudo-Simonidean, we have Page's Further Greek Epigrams (FGE). In some cases, the same testimony appears in both Poetici Melici Graeci and Further Greek Epigrams. Campbell's Loeb (C) follows the enumeration of Poetici Melici Graeci and Further Greek Epigrams, but for the elegiac fragments, its model is West's first edition, having been completed just...