Help Me to Sing, Muse, of Plataea

Recovering the opening of Simonides' elegy on the battle of Plataea (frr. 10–17 W²) allows us to see for the first time how a performer of one historical narrative presents his own persona and orients his audience toward the work.¹ The projected attitude of a performer toward his or her material is an important aspect of the audience's reception and interpretation of any poem.² In this commemoration of the leaders and contingents that fought at Plataea the performer's account of his poetic stance will also reveal his strategy for converting people and events into narrative and elevating them to glory.

The opening invites comparison with epic. A proem precedes the narrative, evoking Achilles, embedded in which is an account of (perhaps) the death of Achilles and of the fall of Troy, and in which Homer receives credit for granting the race of heroes its glory.³ The language throughout is reminiscent of epic. M. L. West observes, "The initial hymn to Achilles struck an epic note for the composition and set the conflict against Mardonios upon a heroic plane. It is full of elevated language, Homeric and para-Homeric epithets, and there is even an epic simile (fr. 11.1–3)." ⁴ In this fashion, the performer suggests that he is another Homer. Yet there are two anomalies in this performer's self-presentation as a heroic singer that show him to be modifying the rules of epic utterance: he invokes Achilles, not a divinity, and he asks the Muse to be "auxiliary," epikouros (21), though a moment before he himself had asserted that Homer got the "whole truth" from the Muses (17). Each anomaly has been explained: Achilles is the model for the dead at Plataea, who will be remembered as he is, and the performer needs only help from the Muse because he can supply the content for himself, having witnessed the battle.⁵ Thus Antonio Aloni says of the latter, "The reason for the difference between these two positions is to be found in the subject matter of the poems. Homer could not have been a witness to the events at Troy and therefore relied entirely on the Muses for the truth of his account; Simonides, on the other hand, did witness the Greek war against the Persians and so needs the Muses' help only to guarantee the ability of his poetry to render the truth and thus confer lasting fame on those who took part in the events narrated."⁶

Important observations—but their force is to diminish the effect of these aberrations on the meaning of the poem. Instead we could take the deviations as symptomatic. To begin with, the anomalies have not been taken together, though they are juxtaposed in the text. The performer bids farewell to Achilles (, 19) and turns forthwith to call the Muse (19– 21). This moment is the high point, in the extant text, of the performer's self-dramatization as a speaker through first- and second-person pronouns.⁷ He uses the attention he garners in a peculiar way for one who would be a bard, for the two anomalies reinforce one another. If Achilles is the model for the fallen soldiers at Plataea, why emphasize that the song about them will not come from the same source, the Muses, as the song about Achilles? If the performer wishes to stress his own ability to create heroizing song, why begin with a deviant invocation? It seems that these two features together mark the performer as not-quite-a-bard and the poem as something only similar to epic. And these two features are only the most obvious of what I perceive as a systematic countercurrent of dissociation from epic within the epic pretensions of the performer.⁸

Here I will explore these deviations from epic that the performer dramatizes as his own posture. The argument has four parts. I will look at each of the anomalies just mentioned in turn, and at its implications. In the third part I will examine the nature of the kleos constructed by...