Folded and kissed his budding charms;
To her soft bosom pressed her pride,
And then with truthful words replied:
“If thus a little insect thing
Can pain thee with its tiny sting,
How languish, think you, those who smart
Beneath my Cupid’s cruel dart?
How fatal must that poison prove
That rankles on the shafts of Love!”
Simonides (556-467 B.C.), who brought into high repute the Doric or Choral School while he also composed in the Ionic dialect, was born in Ceos, an island of the Cyclades. He was one of a brilliant coterie of poets attracted to Athens by the munificence of Hipparchus; and after the assassination of the latter he withdrew to Thessaly, to find rich and powerful patrons there on whom to lavish his eulogies; for Simonides was the first poet that set a price upon his talents and turned his panegyrics into gold. He who, when small pay was offered, disdained to celebrate a mule victorious in the race on the plea that it was an ass’s daughter, when the price was raised found in the “child of thunder-footed steeds” no unfit subject for his facile Muse.