Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/130



SIMONIDES

On the day, it is said, that Tisias died, there was born in Keos the next great international lyrist of Greece, SIMONIDES (556-468 B.C.). A man of wide culture and sympathies, as well as great poetic power, he was soon famous outside the circle of Ionian islands. Old Xenophanes, who lived in Italy, and died before Simonides was thirty, had already time to denounce him as a well-known man. He travelled widely-first, it is said, to Western Greece, at the invitation of Stesichorus's compatriots; afterwards to the court of Hipparchus in Athens; and, on his patron's assassination, to the princes of Thessaly. At one time he crossed to Asia; during the Persian War he was where he should have been-with the patriots. He ended his life with Aeschylus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Epicharmus, and others, at the court of Hiero of Syracuse. If he was celebrated at thirty, in his old age he had an international position comparable perhaps to that of Voltaire. He was essentially ὁ σόφος, the wit, the poet, the friend of all the great ones of the earth, and their equal by his sheer force of intellect. His sayings were treasured, and his poems studied with a verbal precision which suggests something like idolatry. Rumour loved to tell of his strange escape from shipwreck, and from the fall of a palace roof at Crannon, which killed most of Scopas's guests. He was certainly a man of rich and many-sided character; he was trusted by several tyrants and the Athenian democracy at the same time; he praised Hipparchus, and admired Harmodius and Aristogeiton; in his old age he was summoned to Sicily to reconcile the two most powerful princ