Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/100

 84 S I M S I M judicious selection of prominent features prove him to have been a keen observer and a real artist. The date of his death is unknown. See Bergk, Poetee Lyrici Grwci, vol. ii., Leipsic, 1882, pp. 441- 459. There is a translation in English verse of part of the poem oil women in Mure's Hist, of Gr. Lit., iii. p. 181. SIMONIDES OF CEOS (556-469 B.C.), one of the greatest poets and most accomplished men of antiquity, was born at lulis in the island of Ceos, 556 B.C. Few poetic natures have ever been planted in more congenial soil. His native island was devoted to the worship of Apollo, the god of song ; poetry had been cultivated in his family for generations ; his youth coincided with the period succeed- ing the first great burst of /Eolian and Doric lyric poetry ; his manhood saw the heroic struggle with Persia, when Greece first awoke to the consciousness of her national unity ; and he died before the inevitable disintegration had begun. Among his friends were all the foremost men of the day, kings and princes like Hipparchus and Hiero and the Aleuadce and Scopadas, statesmen like Pausanias and Themistocles, and poets like JEschylus, Epicharmus, and his own nephew Bacchylides. Pindar alone among his con- temporaries seems to have depreciated Simonides, perhaps not without a touch of jealousy; by all the rest he was revered as the poet laureate of emancipated Greece. He lived for the most part with his friends, whose praises he had sung for money ; we hear of him at the court of Hip- parchus in Athens, with the Scopadse in Thessaly, and finally at the court of Hiero of Syracuse, where he died in 469 B.C. His reputation as a man of learning and ingenuity is shown by the tradition that he added two new letters to the alphabet 77 and w the truth being probably that he was one of the first authors to use these symbols, before the archonship of Euclides. So unbounded were his popu- larity and influence that he was felt to be a power even in the political world ; we are told that he reconciled Thero and Hiero on the eve of a battle between their opposing armies. For his poems he could command almost any price : later writers, from Aristophanes onwards, accuse him of avarice, probably not without some reason. From the numerous anecdotes preserved about him we see that he was what we should infer from his poems, a genial and courtly man, " dwelling with flowers, like the bee, seeking yellow honey " (Fr. 47), yet not without a vein of gentle irony. To Hiero's queen, who asked him whether it was better to be born rich or a genius, he replied " Rich, for genius is ever found at the gates of the rich." Of his poetry we possess two or three short elegies (Fr. 85 seems from its style and versification to belong to Simonides of Amorgos, or at least not to be the work of our poet), several epigrams, and about ninety fragments of lyric poetry. The epigrams, written in the usual dialect of elegy, Ionic with an epic colouring, were intended partly for public and partly for private monuments. There is strength and sublimity in the former, with a simplicity that is almost statuesque, and a complete mastery over the rhythm and forms of elegiac expression. Those on the heroes of Marathon and Thermopylae are the most celebrated. In the private epigrams there is more warmth of colour and feeling, but here it is hard to decide which are genuine and which spurious ; few of them rest on any better authority than that of the Palatine anthology. One interesting and undoubtedly genuine epigram of this class is upon Archedice, the daughter of Hippias the Pisistratid, who, " albeit her father and husband and brother and children were all princes, was not lifted up in soul to pride." The lyric fragments vary much in character and length : one is from a poem on Artemisium, and celebrates those who fell at Thermopylae ; another is an ode in honour of Scopas ; the rest represent odes on victors in the games, hyporchemes, dirges, hymns to the gods, and other varieties. The poem on Thermopylse is reverent and sublime, breathing an exalted patriotism and a lofty national pride ; the others are full of tender pathos and deep feeling, such as evoked from Catullus the line Msestius lacrimis Simonideis," with a genial worldliness befitting one who had "seen the towns and learnt the mind of many men." For Simonides requires no standard of lofty unswerving rectitude. " It is hard," he says (Fr. 5), " to become a truly good man, perfect as a square in hands and feet and mind, fashioned without blame. Whosoever is bad, and not too wicked, knowing justice, the benefactor of cities, is a sound man. 1 for one will iind 110 fault with him, for the race of fools is infinite I praise and love all men who do no sin willingly ; but with necessity even the gods do not contend." A r irtue, he tells us elsewhere in language that recalls Hesiod, is set on a high and difficult hill (Fr. 58) ; let us seek after pleasure, for ' ' all things come to one dread Charybdis, both great virtues and wealth " (Fr. 38), and " what life of mortal man, or what dominion, is to be desired apart from pleasure, without which even the gods' existence is not to be envied '' (Fr. 71). Yet Simonides is far from being a hedonist ; his morality, no less than his art, is pervaded by that virtue for which Ceos was renowned auxfrpoavvri or self-restraint. His most cele- brated fragment, and one of the most exquisite and touching remains of ancient poetry, is a dirge, in which Danae, adrift with the infant Perseus on the sea in a dark and stormy night, takes comfort from the peaceful slumber of her babe. Simonides here illustrates his own saying that "poetry is vocal painting, as painting is silent poetry " (one of the opening remarks in Lessing's Laocoon) : from the picture of the sleeping child, standing out as if in relief against the background of surging waves, and Danae in tears, we can well understand how Longiuus should have commended this power of vivid presentation as a distinguishing feature in another of Simonides's poems. This poem has been often translated. One of the best translations is that by Symouds, in the first series of his Studies on the Greek Poets. See Bergk, Poetas Lyrici Grxci, vol. iii., Leipsic, 1882, pp. 382-535. Welcker was the first who clearly separated the fragments of the Cean Simonides from those of his namesuke. Sterling (Essays and Tales, vol. i. pp. 188 sq.) has a poetical translation of most of them. SIMONY is an offence against the law of the church. The name is taken from SIMON MAGUS (q.v.). In the canon law the word bears a more extended meaning than in English law. " Simony according to the canonists," says Ayliffe in his Parergon, " is defined to be a deliberate act or a premeditated will and desire of selling such things as are spiritual, or of anything annexed unto spirituals, by giving something of a temporal nature for the purchase thereof ; or in other terms it is defined to be a commutation of a thing spiritual or annexed unto spirituals by giving something that is temporal." An example of the offence occurs as early as the 3d century in the purchase of the bishopric of Carthage by a wealthy matron for her servant, if the note to Gibbon (vol. ii. p. 457) is to be believed. The offence was prohibited by many councils, both in the East and in the West, from the 4th century onwards. In the Corpus Juris Canonici the Decretum (pt. ii. cause i. quest. 3) and the Decretals (bk. v. tit. 3) deal with the subject. The offender, whether simoniacus (one who had bought his orders) or simoniace promotus (one who had bought his promotion), was liable to deprivation of bis benefice and deposition from orders if a secular priest, to confinement in a stricter monastery if a regular. No distinction seems to have been drawn between the sale of an immediate and of a reversionary interest. The innocent simoniace promotus was, apart from dispensation, liable to the same penalties as though he were guilty. Certain matters were simoniacal by the canon law which would not be so regarded in English law, e.g., the sale of tithes, the taking of a fee for confes- sion, absolution, marriage, or burial, the concealment of one in mortal sin or the reconcilement of an impenitent for the sake of gain, and the doing homage for spiritualities. So grave was the crime of simony considered that even infamous persons could accuse of it. English provincial and legatine constitutions continually assailed simony. Thus one of the heads in Lyndewode (bk. v.) is, " Ne quis ecclesiam nomine dotalitatis transferat vel pro prajsenta- tione aliquid accipiat." In spite of all the provisions of the canon law it is well established that simony was deeply rooted in the mediaeval church. Dante places persons guilty of simony in the third bolgia of the eighth circle of the Inferno : " Simon mago, miseri seguaci, Che le cose di Dio che di bontate Deono esser spose, voi rapaci Per oro e per argento adulterate.' Inf., xix. 1.