Simonides the Poet: Intertextuality and Reception
Cambridge University Press, 4/19/2018
EAN 9781107141704, ISBN10: 1107141702
Hardcover, 318 pages, 23.5 x 18.3 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
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.
Introduction
Part I. Simonides and the Poets of the Past
1. Epic traditions in lyric songs
2. The 'new Simonides'
Homeric and Elegiac transformations
Part II. Simonidea
Simonides Through Ancient Receptions
3. Pindar, Simonides and money
Pindar's Isthmian 2
4. Simonides and wealth
a critical description of the tradition
5. From stories to songs
Simonides êßìâéî in the fragments
6. Simonides, history and êëÃÂïò
Theocritus' Charites or Hieron. Conclusion.