The Hymnic Structure of the New Simonides

Abstract

Among recent papyrological finds, a portion of identifiably Simonidean elegy preserved on papyrus from Oxyrhynchus is almost without parallel in its potential for reorienting our thinking about early Greek poetry. The tale is a familiar one: a fragmentary ancient manuscript overlaps with another, previously known, but unidentified, and with two quotations in ancient authors. Out of the composite, a new poem can almost be said to exist. The cost for us is that difficulties are “raised in places where there were none.” Plutarch, who quotes several distichs, supplies an author and subject. The two papyrus MSS (POxy 3965 and 2327) provide us with two different copies of the poem, preserving in all over one hundred completely or partially preserved lines of elegy, which uniquely combine features of Pindaric encomium, Homeric phraseology, sub-epic narrative technique, and Tyrtaean battle themes to recount and memorialize an historical event of considerable military and political importance. For this reason the new fragments of Simonides’ poem on the battle at Plataea augment in an unexpected way our corpus of early Greek celebratory poetry. Scarcely more than five years earlier, E. L. Bowie had posited the existence of just such a class of early Greek elegy as distinct