In connection with this rather unpoetical eye to business, we are told that once Simonides, having extolled in verse one of his Thessalian patrons, was refused more than half the promised price and referred for the balance to the gods Castor and Pollux, whose praises filled most of the poem. The Thessalian noble was still laughing at his ruse for evading payment, when Simonides was summoned from the room to speak with two strangers. Hastening out, he found that they had vanished; but no sooner had he withdrawn from the apartment than the roof fell and killed all whom he had left there. Thus the twin deities discharged their indebtedness to the poet.
The evening of his days Simonides passed in Syracuse, the ornament of Hi’ero’s court, the recipient of royal favors during his life, and at his death of the highest funeral honors. It was here that the poet, who was somewhat of a philosopher, confessed his inability to answer the question of the Syracusan monarch, “What is God?”
Simonides was remarkably successful in adapting the elegy to funeral songs and epitaphs, and thus embalming Grecian heroism for the contemplation of future ages. He lived in the time of the Persian War, and commemorated its worthies. The tomb of the three hundred who fell at Thermopylæ for the liberties of Greece bore this grand inscription from his pen: “Go, stranger, and tell the Lacedæmonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws.” In his workshop the epigram was wrought to perfection. “The Simonidean tears" seemed to well up from the very depths of the heart. Among all the epigrammatists known to literature, none have excelled him whom Plato styled “the divine Simonides;” who was “the voice of Hellas—the genius of Fame, sculpturing with a pen of adamant, in letters of indelible gold, the achievements to which the whole world owes its civilization.” Fifty-six times, the last time at the age of eighty, he bore away from all competitors the prize of poetry.
Besides dirges and epigrams, hymns, prayers, pæans, and processional odes, flowed from the prolific pen of Simonides. Long a chorus-teacher in the land of his birth, he was peculiarly fitted for the composition of solemn choral poetry. “The Lament of Danaë,” his finest surviving work, is a noble specimen of the Greek lyric. It describes the Argive princess set adrift with her child in an ark upon the stormy billows by her inhuman parent. Tenderly she folds the sleeping boy in her arms, and prays Father Zeus that like him the sea may sleep.
DANAË’S LAMENT.
“Closed in the fine-wrought chest,
She felt, the rising wind the waters move.
Then, by new fear possessed,
With action wild
And cheeks bedewed, she stretched her arms of love