Opening The Fragments of Simonides — Simonides in Plato Scroll…
Continue → · About this text
Simonides · J. M. Edmonds (Loeb Classical Library, 1924)
[Image: ]A 1900 depiction of the Battle of Marathon, which Simonides was commissioned to commemorate Strabo GeographyCEOS was originally a tetrapolis, but only two of the four remain as separate cities, Iulis and Carthaea, the former having absorbed Coresia and the latter Poieëssa. Iulis was the birthplace of the lyric poet Simonides and of his nephew Bacchylides, and later of the physician Erasistratus and the Peripatetic philosopher Ariston... There appears to have been a law here, mentioned by Menander in the lines ‘The Cean custom takes my fancy still, / The man who can’t live well shall not live ill,’ whereby, in order to make the supplies go round, all citizens who had reached the age of sixty should drink the hemlock. [hence partly perh. S.’s voluntary exile after middle-age; had the law been enforced in his case, much of his finest extant work would never have been done] …
Editions (plain text / reader):