Simonides is tantalising and enigmatic, known both from fragments and from an extensive tradition of anecdotes. This monograph, the first in English for a generation, employs a two-part diachronic approach: Richard Rawles first reads Simonidean fragments with attention to their intertextual relationship with earlier works and traditions, and then explores Simonides through his ancient reception. In the first part, interactions between Simonides' own poems and earlier traditions, both epic and lyric, are studied in his melic fragments and then in his elegies. The second part focuses on an important strand in Simonides' ancient reception, concerning his supposed meanness and interest in remuneration. This is examined in Pindar's Isthmian 2, and then in Simonides' reception up to the Hellenistic period. The book concludes with a full re-interpretation of Theocritus 16, a poem which engages both with Simonides' poems and with traditions about his life.

The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities. In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.

Over the course of his life (550-460 BC), the Greek poet Simonides produced poetic work of every kind then extant. Unfortunately, Simonides' corpus has survived only in fragments, though classical scholars have been studying his work for generations. The 1992 discovery of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri revolutionized the study of Simonides, casting particular light on the epic of Plataea. This edited volume gathers the best of the recent research on Simonides' newly expanded oeuvre into a single collection that will be an important reference for scholars of Greek poetry.

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

'Mary Renault's portraits of the ancient world are fierce, complex and eloquent, infused at every turn with her life-long passion for the Classics. Her characters live vividly both in their own time, and in ours' MADELINE MILLER Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us. She shows us their strangeness; discerning, sure-footed, challenging our values, piquing our curiosity, she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us' HILARY MANTEL In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts. Born into a stern farming family on the island of Keos, Simonides escapes his harsh childhood through a lucky apprenticeship with a renowned Ionian singer. As they travel through 5th century B.C. Greece, Simonides learns not only how to play the kithara and compose poetry, but also how to navigate the shifting alliances surrounding his rich patrons. He is witness to the Persian invasion of Ionia, to the decadent reign of the Samian pirate king Polykrates, and to the fall of the Pisistratids in the Athenian court. Along the way, he encounters artists, statesmen, athletes, thinkers, and lovers, including the likes of Pythagoras and Aischylos. Using the singer's unique perspective, Renault combines her vibrant imagination and her formidable knowledge of history to establish a sweeping, resilient vision of a golden century. 'There's much to say about her interweaving of myth and history and, just as interestingly, there's much to wonder at in the way she fills in the large dark spaces where we know next to nothing about the times she describes . . . an important and wonderful writer . . . she set a course into serious-minded, psychologically intense historical fiction that today seems more important than ever' - Sam Jordison, Guardian

Stesichorus' lyric poetry vividly recreates the most dramatic episodes of Greek myth: the labours of Heracles, the sack of Troy, the vengeance of Orestes, and more besides. It can be appreciated today as never before, thanks to the recent discovery of ancient manuscripts buried for some two millennia in the sands of Egypt. This fresh edition of Stesichorus' poems presents the first full-scale analysis of all his surviving works. The detailed introduction and commentary investigate a wide range of key issues, such as Stesichorus' imagery and style, his narrative technique, and his mythological innovations. The controversial question of how Stesichorus' poems were originally performed receives careful scrutiny; particular attention is paid to the fascinating story of the transmission, disappearance, and recovery of his work. A translation integrated with the commentary renders this book accessible to all readers with an interest in early Greek poetry and its legacy.

In his examination of the public life and poetic career of Simonides, Molyneux has provided a thorough examination of all the documentary evidence available with respect to one of history's major choral lyric poets.

In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts. Born into a stern farming family on the island of Keos, Simonides escapes his harsh childhood through a lucky apprenticeship with a renowned Ionian singer. As they travel through 5th century B.C. Greece, Simonides learns not only how to play the kithara and compose poetry, but also how to navigate the shifting alliances surrounding his rich patrons. He is witness to the Persian invasion of Ionia, to the decadent reign of the Samian pirate king Polykrates, and to the fall of the Pisistratids in the Athenian court. Along the way, he encounters artists, statesmen, athletes, thinkers, and lovers, including the likes of Pythagoras and Aischylos. Using the singer's unique perspective, Renault combines her vibrant imagination and her formidable knowledge of history to establish a sweeping, resilient vision of a golden century.

Groundbreaking study of the poet Simonides, approaching his work through intertextual readings of the fragments and his ancient reception.

Anthology. The Greek origins of the word gesture at a bouquet, a garland; “a flower-logic, a petal-theory, a blossom-word.” In Stone-Garland, Dan Beachy-Quick brings the term back to its roots, linking together the lives and words of six singular ancient Greeks. Simonides: honest servant to patrons. Anacreon: lustful singer, living on in the work of his acolytes. Archilochus: cruel critic, beloved of the Muses. Alcman: who took birds as his teachers. Theognis: chronicler of human excellence and vice. Callimachus: cosmopolitan head librarian at Alexandria. These are the poets who appear in these pages, sometimes in fragments, sometimes in sustained glimpses. Drawing inspiration from the Greek Anthology, first drafted in the first century BC, Beachy-Quick presents translations filled with lovers and children, gods and insects, earth and water, ideas and ideals. Throughout, the line between the ancient and the contemporary blurs, and “the logic of how life should be lived decays wondrously into the more difficult possibilities of what life is.” Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.