The New Simonides: Introduction

1992 was an annus mirabilis for Simonides studies: first came the publication of POxy 3965, edited by P. J. Parsons, followed very soon afterwards (by careful design) by the second edition of the second volume of M. L. West's Iambi et Elegi Graeci, which was greatly to increase our knowledge of Simonides' elegies. For the most part POxy 3965 contains hitherto unknown elegiac verses, but some few words were shown to belong to literary quotations by Plutarch (15 W²) and Stobaeus (20 W²).¹ Since, moreover, the new papyrus also overlapped in two places with POxy 2327, hitherto anonymous (although its editor Edgar Lobel raised the possibility of Simonidean authorship),² this earlier papyrus, languishing in the obscurity which anonymity brings,³ was now able to be added to the corpus of new Simonidean elegy, all of which is available in West's second edition.

Where four and a half pages sufficed for Simonides in West's first edition, this poet now takes up more than 24 pages, and West's original 17 fragments are now 92 (many of course quite scrappy). Both POxy 2327 and 3965, it seems, may be copies of but one Alexandrian book which contained either all or part of Simonides' elegiac poetry.⁴ Rutherford's commentary describes the physical state of the papyri and the overlaps that were critical in identifying them. What, though, of their contents? It is easy to see—and this surely is the most exciting news of Parsons' and West's publications of 1992—that much of it describes one or more recently fought battles, a type of elegiac poetry for which we had some secondhand evidence and to which we could assign a few literary quotations, but of which we did not possess many continuous lines.⁵ From this we now may claim to have an . The new battle fragments give us a hymn-like proem (if not to the poem as a whole, at least to an important segment); references to Homer, his heroes, and his Muses (with suggestions as to how Simonides may be compared to his illustrious predecessor); and overall a sense of the shape of a long elegy on an event heroic enough to rival the deeds of epic.

In brief—so as not to anticipate the detailed studies by Obbink, Stehle, and Boedeker, or to suggest that we are all in agreement on every point—it was already known before 1992 that in addition to many inscriptional epigrams ascribed to Simonides, he produced longer poems on recent battles: literary sources, albeit somewhat confused, credit him with both elegy and lyrics on Artemisium, with lyrics on Salamis and Thermopylae, and with an elegy on Plataea (details in Rutherford's commentary). Perhaps we can add an elegy on the battle of Marathon with which Simonides won out over (inter alios?) Aeschylus—although the word used here more often refers to an inscriptional epigram.⁶

Should we now regard battle poetry as a distinct genre? Or should we, at least at the beginning of investigation into the new Simonides, compare it more broadly to historical or political elegy? If we do so, the evidence for elegies of Callinus, Mimnermus, Tyrtaeus, Solon, Semonides, Xenophanes, Panyassis, and Aeschylus suggest that poetry of this sort could encompass mythic paradigms, historical events ranging in time from the distant to the immediate past,⁷ and exhortations for the immediate future.⁸ We are far from claiming that every historical-political elegy of every one of these poets contained each of these elements. We merely wish to keep open the question of the nature of these longer poems before we assign to them, and to Simonides in particular, what may turn out to be too rigid categories of genre. This should be kept in mind as the related questions of the aim and performance of the Plataea elegy are discussed below by Stehle and Boedeker.

In addition to the battle poems, there are other fragments among the new Simonides material which—with their references to the mixing of wine, to crowns, Aphrodite, thighs, desires, and journeys...