Simonides
historical figure · 16 works · 22 mentions · 28 anchored passages
Simonides of Ceos · Simonides son of Leoprepes · Simonides, the poet · a Simonides
spoken of as
1 expressionSimonides of Ceos1 mention
The Histories (Greek)
The Persians put to the sword many men of renown including Eualcides the general of the Eretrians who had won crowns as victor in the games and been greatly praised by Simonides of Ceos.
in the texts
Stromata
Poet quoted for verses ranking health, beauty, and wealth.
Simonides, then, like Aristotle, writes:
To be healthy is best for a man,
and:
Tusculan Disputations
Poet renowned for having had an extraordinary memory.
I do not ask how great a memory Simonides is said to have had, how great Theodectes, how great Cineas, who was sent as envoy by Pyrrhus to the senate, how great Charmadas lately, how great Metrodorus of Scepsis, who lived but recently, how great our own Hortensius:
With like spirit the Spartans fell at Thermopylae, on whom Simonides wrote:
The Histories
Poet who composed the epitaph for the seer Megistias out of a bond of guest-friendship.
That of the seer Megistias was inscribed by Simonides son of Leoprepes because of his tie of guest-friendship with the man.
The Persians put to the sword many men of renown including Eualcides the general of the Eretrians who had won crowns as victor in the games and been greatly praised by Simonides of Ceos.
The Rights of War and Peace
Poet cited for a definition of justice tied to truthfulness and restitution.
Tully, in the first book of his Offices, assigns such force to the obligation of promises, that he calls fidelity the foundation of justice, which Horace also styles the sister of justice, and the Platonists often call justice, truth, which Apuleius has translated fidelity, and Simonides has defined justice to be not only returning what one has received, but also speaking the truth.
And perhaps under the head of this right, it may not be improper to assign a place to that true speaking, which Plato, following Simonides, classes with justice, in order to from a more striking contrast with that falsehood, so often prohibited in Scripture, by the name of false witness to, or against, our neighbour, and which Augustin, in defining a lie, calls an intention to deceive.
Hiero
The poet and interlocutor who questions Hiero, challenges his complaints, and later offers a program for making rule popular and beneficial.
I assure you far fewer pleasures fall to despots than to citizens of modest means, and many more and much greater pains.
Well, Hiero, retorted Simonides, I am not surprised that you are out of heart with despotism for the moment, since you hold that it cuts you off from gaining the affection of mankind, which you covet.
Well, said Simonides, taking the suggestion, I think I have observed that sights affect private citizens with pleasure and pain through the eyes, sounds through the ears, smells through the nostrils, meat and drink through the mouth, carnal appetites—of course we all know how.
Birds
The lyric poet Simonides, invoked by the unnamed Poet as the standard against which he measures his own dithyrambs.
I have composed verses in honor of your Nephelococcygia, a host of splendid dithyrambs and parthenia worthy of Simonides himself.
Clouds
A poet whose song 'The Shearing of the Ram' Strepsiades asks his son to sing at a feast, and whom Phidippides dismisses as old-fashioned and a bad poet.
I first bade him take a lyre, and sing a song of Simonides, The Shearing of the Ram.
and he asserted that Simonides was a bad poet.
Constitution of the Athenians
Poet invited to Athens by Hipparchus.
Hipparchus was playful, amorous, and a lover of the Muses (and it was he who sent for Anacreon and Simonides and the other poets).
Nicomachean Ethics
Greek poet whose saying about money is referenced and rejected by the liberal man's attitude.
he does not agree with the saying of Simonides.
Letters
Greek lyric poet invoked as the kind of poet needed to lament the city's calamities.
Or is it that we truly needed a Simonides, or some such lyric poet, skilled to lament over sufferings vividly?
On Moral Ends
Greek poet credited with the invention of a system of memory (mnemonics)
Themistocles, indeed, when Simonides or someone else promised him an art of memory, said, 'I would rather one of forgetting;
On the Commonwealth
Greek poet whose birth date is used to fix the era of Romulus's death
And in the same year in which he died, was born Simonides, in the fifty-sixth Olympiad;
On the Nature of the Gods
Greek poet cited by Cotta as an example of wise hesitation in defining the nature of god.
I shall take Simonides for my authority, of whom, when the tyrant Hiero asked this very question, he begged one day to deliberate;
Orations
Greek lyric poet credited with epigrams commemorating the Corinthian dead at Salamis and the general Adeimantus.
For I do not heed Herodotus, but the tomb and Simonides, who inscribed upon the dead of the Corinthians buried in Salamis:
And there is another epigram of Simonides upon the general himself, a special one:
Republic
The poet whose maxim that justice is 'rendering to each his due' is invoked and examined at length.
And so we shall find ourselves saying the very opposite of what we affirmed Simonides to mean.
It is then something other than this that Simonides must, as it seems, mean by the saying that it is just to render back what is due.
Tell me, then, you the inheritor of the argument, what it is that you affirm that Simonides says and rightly says about justice.
History of the Peloponnesian War
Athenian commander who briefly seizes Eion in Thrace before being repelled.
At this same period, Simonides, an Athenian commander, having got together a few Athenians from the guard-stations, and a large body of the allies in that neighbourhood, took possession of Eion in Thrace, a colony from Mende, and hostile [to Athens], which was betrayed to him.