The New Simonides

Over the course of his life (550-460 BC), the Greek poet Simonides produced poetic work of every kind then extant. Unfortunately, Simonides' corpus has survived only in fragments, though classical scholars have been studying his work for generations. The 1992 discovery of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri revolutionized the study of Simonides, casting particular light on the epic of Plataea. This edited volume gathers the best of the recent research on Simonides' newly expanded oeuvre into a single collection that will be an important reference for scholars of Greek poetry.

Groundbreaking study of the poet Simonides, approaching his work through intertextual readings of the fragments and his ancient reception.

This book considers what evidence the "new Simonides" fragments offer for Simonides' elegiac compositions on the Persian Wars. The current orthodoxy is that they represent three separate elegies on individual battles, one on Artemisium, one on Salamis, and one on Plataea. Kowerski evaluates what evidence these fragments provide for these compositions, and in doing so, questions the validity of the current interpretation of the "new Simonides."

The Greek poet Simonides produced elegies, threnodies, choral odes and a small epic. In 1992 a new fragment of the oxyranchus papyri was discovered to contain a substantial amount of his work, which has revolutionised scholars' views.

The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities. In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.

This edition and commentary covers, for the most part, those poems by Simonides written in elegiac distichs now called epigrams and elegies. Each poem and fragment is accompanied by a detailed commentary and translation, where applicable, while a comprehensive general Introduction sets Simonides and his works into their historical context.

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