Summary

Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–c. 468/7) was a Greek poet of the Archaic to Classical period, who, in both the Doric and Ionic dialects, wrote elegies and epigrams in elegiac couplets and lyric verses in a variety of genres: paeans, threnodies, epinicians, dithyrambs, partheneia, and hyporchemata. The elegies were either public (such as the one in celebration of the Greek victory over the Persians in 479 bce) or personal, for recitation at symposia and often spoken in his own voice. All others, with the exception of one epitaphic epigram, were commissioned either by individuals or by cities. These activities earned him the reputation of being greedy. His works were highly regarded: one lyric poem was analyzed at length in Plato’s Protagoras and they were the subject of several treatises in the fourth century, as well as being alluded to by later poets such as Theocritus, Callimachus, Catullus, and Horace.