Читать книгу Yale Classics - Ancient Greek Literature - Anacreon - Страница 170

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On the day, it is said, that Tisias died, there was born in Keos the next great international lyrist of Greece, SIMÔNIDES ( 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 Simônides 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 Stêsichorus'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 Æschylus, 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 o+̔σóøος, 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 the 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 princes in Greece, Gelo and Hiero. The charges of avarice which pursue his memory are probably due to his writing poems à prix firé -- 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 Simônides's plan was the nearest approach then possible to our system of the independent sale of brain-work to the public. Simônides, 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 'Epinîkos,' the serious artistic poem in honour of victories at the games. Not that an 'Epinîkos' is really a bare ode on a victory -- on the victory, for instance, of Prince Skopas's mules. Such an ode would have 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.

Simônides wrote in many styles: we hear of Dithyrambs, Hyporchêmata, Dirges -- all these specially admired -- Parthenia, Prosodia, Paeans, Encômia, 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 Simônides's poems on the events of the great war -- the ode on Artemisium, the epitaph on those who died at Thermopylae. They represent the extreme of Greek 'sôphrosynê' -- self-mastery, healthymindedness -- 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 fragment on Danaë adrift in the chest justifies the admiration of ancient critics for his 'unsurpassed pathos.' On the other hand, he is essentially an Ionian and a man of the world, one of the fathers of the Enlightenment. He has no splendour, no passion, no religious depth. The man who had these stood on the wrong side in his country's life-struggle; and Greece turned to Simônides, not to Pindar, to make the record of its heroic dead.