1. Of Ceos (a small Ionian Greek island off the coast of Attica), 556–468 BC, Greek lyric and elegiac poet and famous writer of sepulchral epigrams. He was uncle of the poet Bacchylides. As a professional poet he travelled widely in the Greek world. He was the guest of Hipparchus at Athens during the Peisistratid tyranny, and subsequently went to Thessaly, where he was the guest of the Scopads and later wrote a dirge lamenting their deaths (see below). He seems to have been in Athens in 490, when his epitaph on the Athenian dead at the battle of Marathon (see PERSIAN WARS) was preferred to that of Aeschylus who had fought in it. After the Persian Wars he became the ally of Themistocles, on whose behalf he attacked in his poetry the Rhodian poet Timocreon. When he was 80 he won the dithyrambic competition at Athens ‘in the archonship of Adeimantus’ (477). In about 476 he was invited to the court of Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, with whom he stayed until his death; while there he is said to have settled a quarrel between Hieron and Theron (tyrant of Acragas). He died in Sicily and was buried at Acragas.
Very many stories circulated about him, some concerning his fondness for money, which became proverbial (he is said to have been the first Greek poet to write eulogies for pay). The most famous story concerns his visit to the Scopads of Thessaly where at a banquet he sang a lyric glorifying his patron, but including a lengthy digression in praise of Castor and Polydeuces (see DIOSCURI). Scopas said that he would pay the poet only half the fee, and he might apply for the rest to the two heroes to whom he had devoted an equal share of the praise. A little later a message came to say that two young men were asking for Simonides at the door of the hall. Simonides rose to speak to them but found no one there; while he was outside, the roof of the hall collapsed, killing all the other guests. Although the dead were crushed out of recognition Simonides was able to remember where each guest sat and so identify each body for burial (he is also said to have invented a technique for remembering).
Despite his great reputation in antiquity, most of Simonides' poetry is lost. Comparatively little survives in quotation, and papyrus finds have been very fragmentary. He wrote hymns, scolia, encomia (including the poem to Scopas from which a long passage survives in Plato's Protagoras, quoted there as the basis for discussion), epinicians (the few surviving lines suggest that these were more playful than Pindar's), and elegies. He was most famed for dirges and for epigrams to be inscribed on dedications and tombstones, particularly for those referring to the dead of the Persian Wars, although it is difficult to be sure which ones were genuinely written by him. Probably genuine is that on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae:
Tell them in Lacedaemon, passer-by,
That here obedient to their words we lie.
2. Alternative spelling of Semonides.
