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 es in [107] Greece, Gelo and Hiero. The charges of avarice which pursue his memory are probably due to his writing poems à prix fixé-not for vague, unspecified patronage, like the earlier poets. The old fashion was more friendly and romantic, but contained an element of servitude. Pindar, who laments its fall, did not attempt to recur to it; and really Simonides's plan was the nearest approach then possible to our system of the independent sale of brain-work to the public. Simonides, like the earlier lyrists, dealt chiefly in occasional poetry-the occasion being now a festival, now a new baby, now the battle of Thermopylae-and he seems to have introduced the 'Epinikos,' the serious artistic poem in honour of victories at the games. Not than an 'Epinikos' is really a bare ode on a victory-on the victory, for instance, of Prince Skopas's mules. Such an ode would haev little power of conferring immortality. It is a song in itself beautiful and interesting, into which the poet is paid to introduce a reference to the mules and their master.

Simonides wrote in many styles: we hear of Dithyrambs, Hyporchemata, Dirges-all these specially admired-Parthenia, Prosodia, Paeans, Encomia, Epigrams. His religious poetry is not highly praised. If one could use the word 'perfect' of any work of art, it might apply to some of Simonides's poems on the events of the great war-the ode on Artemisium, the epitaph on those who died at Thermopyla. They represent the extreme of Greek 'sophrosyne'-self-mastery, healthy-mindedness-severe beauty, utterly free from exaggeration or trick-plain speech, to be spoken in the presence of simple and eternal things: "Stranger, bear word to the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their charge." He is great, too, in the realm of human pity. The little [108]