Scholarship on Simonides often lays considerable stress on his Panhellenism, making him the exemplary poet of the Hellenic ethos and the Greek response to the Persian Wars. Perceptions about the Panhellenic import of his poetry in turn influence our reconstructions of the poems’ performance: what kind of festival, and where, saw the premieres of the lyric for the fallen at Thermopylae (531 PMG = 261 Poltera) or the ‘Plataea elegy’ (frr. 10–17 W2)? There is, to be sure, considerable profit in investigating the poet’s construction of a Panhellenic ethos; but we need, at the same time, to keep in mind that the notion of ‘Panhellenism’ did not exist as a prefabricated category into which poets could slot their compositions and to which they could conform. We should be alert to the stresses that underlie the creation of group identities, and the current paper is an effort to observe how this creation plays out in some of Simonides’ poems that deal with the Persian Wars, focusing not so much on Panhellenism as on another, equally important, tension: that between individual and collective (a tension reflected in Greek literature as far back as the Iliad, and one that continued to play a lively role for centuries to come). The opening decades of the fifth century BCE are a particularly interesting time to observe the interplay between individuals and groups in the struggle for prestige and praise. The epinician poetry of Pindar negotiates, sometimes uneasily, the relationship of the victorious athlete and his family with the city of which he is a part.1 Might we not see similar issues at stake in Simonides’ Persian War poetry, where the stakes were, if anything, higher?
My suggestion is that a particular area of historical tension, the delicate relationship between armies or cities and their leaders, was inscribed within Simonides’ poetic rhetoric. Moreover, just as a tension between the Panhellenic and the epichoric is reflected in scholarship on his Plataea elegy, we shall see in a series of case studies that the parallel tension between individual and collective has also been a faultline along which interpretations of Simonides’ Persian War poems have split. What role is played by Leonidas in the Thermopylae poem (531 PMG = 261 Poltera)? Or by Pausanias in the Plataea elegy (fr. 11.29–34 W2)? One might say that the dominant paradigm in contemporary scholarship’s approach to this material has been collective and Panhellenic, a tendency reinforced by ideas with which we all are familiar: the work on the funeral oration by Nicole Loraux, and related work by Jean-Pierre Vernant.2 In one of Vernant’s formulations (he is speaking of archaic kouroi statues) we are told that
the representation of certain of the dead corresponds to the moment when aristocratic values are already integrated into the civic community, where the beautiful death of the young warrior is already avowedly connected with the hoplite, without being entirely absorbed into the political domain. On this point, Callinus and Tyrtaeus are illuminating. The warrior is surrounded with a cloud of heroism because he risks and gives his life for his fatherland … but he has kept his individuality.3
Interestingly, Vernant also connects Simonides with this moment explicitly. As a generalisation, Vernant’s words are perceptive and have proved valuable, for there is no reason to doubt that the death and memorialisation of a young hoplite could be interpreted as showcasing the integration of aristocratic and group values. It does not, however, extend to the leaders and commanders of civic forces. Vernant moves from the heroic warrior of epic to the hoplite phalanx, yet even the phalanx had its general. The danger of taking as given a fully integrated, hoplitic and collective view of military endeavour in Simonides’ Persian War poetry is that it can flatten out the specificity of individual poems and make us overlook their subtleties.
It is unsurprising that poetry at the time of the Persian Wars should partake of an overarching epinician aesthetic, but writing such poetry was no simple prospect. How do you write a victory ode for Greece, when ‘Greece’ is a collective entity made up of rivalrous poleis, each of which is filled with leaders who want to be the best and achieve supremacy? The nature of ‘Greece’ as a collective entity can be interrogated at several levels. How does it relate to its parts: the separate cities and ethnē (an issue of Panhellenism)? How does each polis relate to its commanding generals (an issue of a commanding individual’s place within the civic or larger group)? Finally, how does the Greek alliance relate to its hēgemōn (an issue both of Panhellenism and of the place of the individual within a larger collective political culture)? In what follows I shall examine three poems and focus on the emergence of the individual – in particular a royal or commanding individual – from the mass of his fellow fighters.
This is a tension-filled moment precisely because of the broad accuracy of our general view of the collective ideology of the funeral oration and the beautiful death. Every Greek, however, wanted to emerge from the collective into the light of victory, and Simonides was writing at a time when certain individuals were well placed to do just this, and did do so – or attempted to. The focus of my analysis will, then, be three major figures from the Persian conflicts: Leonidas, Themistocles and Pausanias. All of these men (probably) figured in an important piece of Simonidean poetry, but their status in each of these contexts has been seen as problematic. This is particularly the case with Leonidas in the Thermopylae lyric (PMG 531= 261 Poltera) and Pausanias in the Plataea elegy (fr. 11 W2), where different interpretations view them either as the principal honorands, or as exemplary figures associated with more general civic or cultural virtues. I shall extend this problematic to Simonides’ shadowy Salamis poem as well, arguing that all three poems, ‘Thermopylae’, ‘Salamis’ and ‘Plataea’, balance the status of a heroic individual with the honours due to the mass of soldiers.
Simonides wrote at least one epigram commemorating a man who fell at Thermopylae, his friend Megistias (cf. Hdt. 7.228 = AP 7.677 = VI FGE). It later became popular to ascribe many of the epigrams on the dead of the Persian Wars to him.4 That he wrote a lyric poem on the dead at Themopylae is guaranteed by Diodorus, who at the end of his discussion of the three hundred Spartans killed in that battle reports that Simonides wrote an encomium of them (Diod. Sic. 11.11.6 = 531 PMG = 261 Poltera). He then quotes several lines of Simonidean verse.
This much-studied lyric raises issues of community and commemoration, both on the textual and, consequently, the interpretative level. Here is Page’s PMG text:
Glorious is the fortune of those who died at Thermopylae, fair is their fate.
Their tomb is an altar; instead of lamentation comes remembrance;
pity for them is praise.
Such a shroud as this neither decay
nor time, the subduer of all, shall obliterate.
This precinct of good men has obtained fair fame
throughout Greece as its attendant; Leonidas too bears witness,
the king of Sparta, he who has left behind a great
adornment of excellence, and ever-flowing fame.
In his magisterial edition of the lyric fragments, Poltera has, however, suggested a different reconstruction of the poem:5
| τῶν ἐν Θερμοπύλαις θανόντων | |
| εὐκλεὴς μὲν ἁ τύχα, καλòς δ’ ὁ πότμος, | |
| βωμòς δ’ ὁ τάφος, †προγόνων† δὲ μνᾶστις, ὁ δ’ οἶτος ἔπαινος· | |
| ἐντάφιον δὲ τοιοῦτον εὐρώς | |
| οὔθ’ ὁ πανδαμάτωρ χρόνος· | |
| ἀνδρῶν ἀγαθῶν ὅδε σηκòς οἰκέταν εὐδοξίαν | 5 |
| Ἑλλάδος εἵλετο· | |
| μαρτυρεῖ δὲ Λεωνίδας, | |
| ἀρετᾶς μέγαν λελοιπώς | |
| κόσμον ἀέναόν τε κλέος. | |
| For the dead at Thermopylae | |
| glorious is (their?) fortune; fair is (their?) fate; | |
| The tomb is an altar † … † remembrance; (their) fate is praise. | |
| Such a shroud as this neither decay | |
| nor time, the subduer of all, shall obliterate. | |
| This precinct of good men has obtained fair fame | |
| throughout Greece as its attendant; | |
| Leonidas bears witness, | |
| having left behind a great | |
| adornment of excellence, | |
| and ever-flowing fame. |
These two differing reconstructions raise many questions. Has Diodorus given us the beginning of the poem, and does the first line printed in PMG (τῶν ἐν Θερμοπύλαις θανόντων) belong to it? Is it a title (cf. Poltera), and if so, is it later than the poem itself? What is the relationship between those celebrated in the opening lines and Leonidas, who enters at l. 7? Was Leonidas labelled as king of Sparta (Σπάρτας βασιλεύς in l. 8 of PMG)? Was he qualified with καί (l. 7)? Where was the poem performed and what was its genre? Among the many factors that influence which version of the text one chooses to adopt (i.e. one’s views on what constitutes poetic language), one issue is central for this current investigation: what is the appropriate way to refer to Leonidas? Is he exemplary of the many, or does he stand apart from them?
In what follows, I shall argue that Leonidas should keep his title (Σπάρτας βασιλεύς), that the opening should remain as we see it in PMG, and that the juxtaposition of Leonidas with the rest of the Spartan and other dead of Thermopylae does not integrate the king into the mass of the dead. Rather, Leonidas acts as an authoritative witness to the glory of the 300 Spartans, precisely because of his own claims to pre-eminence. The poem, as Deborah Steiner has well remarked, transforms the conventions of funerary epigrams, so that the evocation of a monument and tomb serves as a foil to verbal commemoration. Rather than (as we might expect) pointing to a grave monument and the dead themselves with demonstratives in the opening (e.g. ‘This, wanderer, is the grave of the Spartans’), Simonides, according to Steiner, ‘marked both person and place as absent in his opening line’.6 Thus the sēkos pointed to by the deictic in l. 6 is a metaphorical rather than a physical precinct, and the entaphion, or shroud, loses its physicality and cannot be destroyed by the ravages of time.7 As we shall shortly see, the absence of a physical tomb may well have had particular resonance in the case of Leonidas; for now, however, we may concentrate on a particular collective, three hundred gloriously dead Spartans.
The poem declares that these have transcended the usual physical appurtenances of death and gained for themselves an everlasting but intangible memorial. If, as Dillery has suggested, a case had to be made that those who died in the Greek defeat at Thermopylae deserved eternal fame, we can see how the pointed displacement of lamentation by praise in l. 2 works to transmute defeat into victory.8 We can see also how the poem subtly emphasises the Panhellenic scope of their achievement. The word ‘Greece’ (Ἑλλάδος), emphatically enjambed at the beginning of l. 7, compels the audience to understand that the fair fame in question is generated by the rest of the Greeks.9 The close proximity, moreover, of ‘Leonidas’ to ‘Greece’ ending and opening the line further makes a claim for the Spartan king’s hegemonic role in a wider context. The progression ‘Greece … Leonidas … Sparta’ in ll. 7–8 creates a network of hegemonic aspiration. Leonidas witnesses the passage from tangible to intangible memorial and from defeat to glory.
But what kind of witness is he? The text as transmitted in Diodorus says simply ‘Leonidas bears witness’ (μαρτυρεῖ δέ, 7) and also specifies that he has left behind a ‘great adornment of excellence and ever-flowing renown’ (ἀρετᾶς μέγαν λελοιπὼς | κόσμον ἀέναόν τε κλέος, 8–9). Arsenius, however, in his version of the Simonidean text, inserts καί before Leonidas’ name.10 Leonidas too bears witness. Something important is at stake here. With καί, one can argue, as does Riccardo Palmisciano, that any focus on Leonidas is attenuated, or, like Anthony J. Podlecki, that the implication is that Leonidas was merely an additional witness, part of a supporting cast.11 Poltera rightly concludes that the καί was inserted by Arsenius or his source because they misunderstood the sequence of thought in Diodorus: how could the poet first speak of the fighters of Thermopylae in general, and then later bring forth Leonidas as the outstanding example?12 Arsenius’ intervention is thus the result of a perceived discomfort concerning the nature of the relationship between Leonidas and the Three Hundred. Interestingly the insertion (or not) of καί is predicated in part on a view regarding the kind of commemoration that is in progress in the poem, and the political context into which it should be set.
Is it, then, true that the thought of the passage becomes confusing if we do not supplement Leonidas with καί? Some have argued that matters may be improved by athetising the first line (τῶν ἐν Θερμοπύλαις θανόντων, 1) or by treating it as a title.13 The reasoning is as follows. Leonidas (and thus those who fell at Thermopylae) enters the poem in our l. 7 as the illustration of the general truth that men who die for their country have the status of heroes. It is only with Leonidas that Diodorus makes the connection to Thermopylae.14 I find this unconvincing. Diodorus’ discussion leading up to the quotation stresses that the three hundred Spartans alone of those who came before them have earned immortality because of their valour. If Simonides’ poem had a general referent, then Diodorus is misquoting or paraphrasing egregiously. The simplest explanation here is probably the best: when Diodorus says that Simonides wrote an encomium of the Three Hundred, we should take him at his word, even if we do not understand ‘encomium’ in its technical sense of a genre of lyric poetry. Generalising the context at the beginning of the poem and removing the reference to Thermopylae simply emends away an interesting and a subtle piece of poetic rhetoric.
We still need to specify, however, precisely how this rhetoric works. The Three Hundred achieve eternal praise and memory, and Leonidas is a witness for this. Certainly, the omission of καί leaves the relationship between king and soldiers more indeterminate –and usefully so. For W. J. H. F. Kegel, ‘personal glory [for Leonidas] does not serve to prove the collective glory of the dead of Thermopylae’: Leonidas was rather the focus of the poem.15 This interpretation, however, does not give enough weight to the terms in which the Three Hundred are glorified here. Should we then continue to try to understand the passage as an expression of communal commemoration and view it as a precursor to the ethic of the Athenian funeral oration? Here, for the most part, the emphasis is not on the individual but on the collective as a part of which the warrior dies. Loraux, for example, suggests that the verses ‘spring from the same source of civic thought as the funeral oration’;16 Tyrtaeus and Callinus are also cited by her as precedents.17 In this line of interpretation, Leonidas is paradigmatic of the Spartan warriors. His individuality becomes exemplary and can be subsumed into the group. Thus Palmisciano18 cites the funeral oration of Hyperides, where Leosthenes, the Athenian commander in the Lamian War, is praised as a representative icon of the Athenian soldiery in general (Hyperides, Epitaphios 15):19
καὶ μηδεὶς ὑπολά|βη<ι> με τῶν ἄλλων πολιτῶν [μη]|δένα λόγον ποιεῖσθαι,| [ἀλλὰ] Λεωσθένη μ<ό>ν<ον> ἐγκω|[μιάζ]ε̣ιν. συμβαίνει γὰρ| [τòν Λε]ωσθένους ἔπαινον | [ἐπὶ ταῖ]ς μάχαις ἐγκώμιον | [τῶν ἄλ]λων πολιτῶν εἶναι· | το[ῦ μὲν] γὰρ βουλεύεσθαι | καλ̣[ῶς ὁ στρα]τηγòς αἴτιος, τοῦ | δὲ νι̣[κᾶν μαχ]ομένους οἱ κιν|δυν[εύειν ἐθ]έ̣λοντες τοῖς σώ|μασ[ιν· ὥστ]ε ὅταν | ἐπαιν[ῶ τὴν γ]εγονυῖαν νίκην, | ἅμα τ[ῆι Λε]ωσθένους ἡγεμονί|αι καὶ [τὴν τ]ῶ̣ν ἄλλων ἀρετὴν | ἐγκωμ[ιάσ]ω.
Let no one suppose that I am ignoring the other citizens and only praising Leosthenes, because it turns out that praise of Leosthenes for his battles is an encomium for the rest of the citizens. For the general is responsible for good deliberation, but those who are willing to risk their bodies are responsible for victory in the fight. So when I praise the victory that has occurred, along with the leadership of Leosthenes I shall be performing an encomium for the excellence of the rest.
It would be pointless to deny that the poem foregrounds many themes that are familiar from later funeral orations, and that have parallels in earlier exhortatory poetry: praise instead of a tomb, the substitution of praise for lamentation, and so on. To do so would be to deprive it of much of its resonance. But I do want to insist that these undoubted parallels should not predetermine the way we interpret the role of Leonidas, so that our only option is to see him as exemplary of the group. We should not read back the funeral oration on to Simonides and let it govern the politics of the ode. Leonidas and the Three Hundred should rather carry their own valences, as communal sacrifice and praise are juxtaposed in the poem with the superlative achievement of an individual.
It may be productive to see the poem as a careful balancing act between king and soldiers, produced at a time when the glory of individual command still carried great weight.20 Herodotus (7.220) tells us that, from a sacral point of view, the death of a Spartan king was necessary to save Lacedaemonia from the Persians. Such an explanation may reflect the reinterpretation of a notable defeat into a prelude to eventual victory, but PMG 531 shows that such an impulse started early.21 Leonidas’ was a particular and indispensable sacrifice, even if the overall result was collective Spartan glory. Indeed, if we look again at the lines in question, we can see that the king’s eternal fame is presented in a different way from that of the other soldiers. In the first part of the poem the stress is on, first, fate and destiny, and then on the transformation of funerary commemoration into poetic glory. Leonidas, on the other hand, is not characterised through transformation and transcendence. His fame is expressed in a perfect participial phrase: he is in a state of having left behind (λελοιπώς) eternal fame.22 He does not need the transformative power of Simonides’ words. Of course, the poem in fact memorialises Leonidas just as it does the soldiers, but the rhetoric is different in each instance.
This brings us, finally, to Leonidas’ act of witness, which is the main action of the sentence. If Leonidas is already in a position where he has eternal fame, this is partly what makes it possible for him to be a good witness. When commentators talk about witnessing here, they usually compare passages from Pindar where a location or a monument witnesses a victory, such as Ol. 13.108, where the altar of Zeus Lycaeus will serve as a witness to the athletic victories of the Oligaithidai.23 This sort of witnessing would fit well if we believed in a performance at or near Leonidas’ tomb in Sparta (to which I shall return),24 but perhaps this is not the sort of witness at issue. One might rather compare passages where the poet stands as witness to an oath or claim of achievement:25
τò καί
ἀνδρὶ κώμου δεσπότᾳ πάρεστι Συρακοσίῳ.
οὔτε δύσηρις ἐὼν οὔτ’ ὦν φιλόνικος ἄγαν,
καὶ μέγαν ὅρκον ὀμόσσαις τοῦτό γέ οἱ σαφέως
μαρτυρήσω· μελίφθογγοι δ’ ἐπιτρέψοντι Μοῖσαι. (Pind. Ol. 6.17–21)
[This compliment uttered by Adrastus for Amphiaraus]
applies also to the Syracusan master of the revel.
He is neither quarrelsome nor too ambitious,
and I shall bear clear witness to this, swearing a great oath.
The Muses with their honey-sweet voices will entrust it to me.
ἐλατὴρ ὑπέρτατε βροντᾶς ἀκαμαντόποδος
Ζεῦ· τεαὶ γὰρ Ὧραι
ὑπò ποικιλοφόρμιγγος ἀοιδᾶς ἑλισσόμεναί μ’ ἔπεμψαν
ὑψηλοτάτων μάρτυρ’ ἀέθλων. (Pind. Ol. 4.1–3)
Zeus, most high driver of the tireless thunder chariot!
Your Seasons in their revolutions have sent me,
accompanied by the song of the complex phorminx,
as a witness to the most lofty contests.
I am not trying to suggest that Leonidas has the authority of a poet, but rather that he has an authority that comes from undoubted achievement. He can validate the fame of his men because he has already achieved such fame himself, independently of them. We have, then, two objects of praise, existing together in a productive tension. One would not want to say that Leonidas is an additional witness to the glory of the Three Hundred, nor that the lines preceding the mention of Leonidas are a preface to the main subject of the poem, nor that he exemplifies the fame of his warriors.26 Rather, he justifies that fame.
Further light can be shed on this question by a consideration of the difficulties surrounding the reconstruction of the context of the poem’s performance. To imagine a performance at Thermopylae itself is implausible: we should then have expected a demonstrative (‘here at Thermopylae’) in the first line, rather than specification of the place where the Spartans died. Maurice Bowra opted for a yearly celebration at a shrine or cenotaph of the heroised Three Hundred in Sparta.27 Unfortunately there is no evidence for the existence of such a shrine, and what evidence we do have indicates rather that there was none.28 Pausanias (3.12.9) reports that Maron and Alpheios, the next best fighters at Thermopylae after Leonidas, had a shrine (hieron) towards the south of the city, and that the tombs of Pausanias and Leonidas were opposite the theatre (Paus. 3.14.1). Near Leonidas’ tomb was a stele with the names of the Three Hundred. We know that the dead of Thermopylae were buried on the battlefield (Hdt. 7.228), but that forty years later Leonidas’ bones were repatriated to Sparta for burial with his Agiad royal ancestors.29 What is interesting for the present purposes is that, in the 470s (the most likely date for the composition of this poem), there may have been no memorials for Pausanias and Leonidas whatsoever at Sparta, unless we revert to the idea of a cenotaph. When Thucydides (1.134) talks about Pausanias’ tomb, he says that at first the Spartans were going to throw the body of the disgraced regent into the Keada; then they buried it somewhere nearby, but ‘later’ the god at Delphi told them to bury Pausanias where he died (that is, just outside the temenos of Athena of the Brazen House, above the theatre). Pausanias died in the late 470s BCE at the earliest, and Leonidas’ body was probably not returned for a generation thereafter.30 Not only was there no shrine for the Three Hundred, but there was probably no grave or cenotaph of Leonidas at Sparta in the early fifth century. It is unlikely, therefore, that Leonidas’ act of witness has anything to do with a physical tomb or its proximity to the place of performance, and this confirms the approach taken by those, like Steiner, who de-emphasise the importance of physical tombs and shrines.
More helpful than this negative finding is the implication of the splendid funeral rites the Spartans gave to their kings. Herodotus (6.58) tells us that these included mass lamentation on the part of the Spartiates, perioikoi and Helots, both men and women. These would beat their faces and wail, ‘declaring that the most recent king to die on each occasion was the best (ἄριστον)’. Whenever a king died in war, they fashioned an image (εἴδωλον) of him and carried it out for burial on a lavishly decorated couch. Funerals were followed by ten days of mourning. Now, this information about the εἴδωλον is fascinating, though difficult to interpret. Lionel Scott, taking his lead from Plutarch (Ages. 40), suggests that the bodies of kings who fell in war were normally repatriated for burial. The image may, therefore, ‘have been an innovation for Leonidas, whose body and severed head had apparently remained in Persian hands after Thermopylae’.31 Paul Cartledge, however, interprets the passage differently: ‘The clear implication is that the actual body of the king would not be brought back, but would be buried on the spot, like those of all other Spartans. In Leonidas’ case there was a very good reason indeed for that practice … and probably his exceptional case was the source of this supposed rule.’32 Both Scott and Cartledge, however, see in Leonidas the origin of the εἴδωλον custom, even though this attributes to Herodotus a very lax attitude towards generalisation.33 Whatever the accurate truth of Spartan practice, it seems clear that Leonidas would have enjoyed a splendid lament and procession at Sparta, although there is no mention of a cenotaph.
Is it possible that the context for the ode might have been the ceremonial funeral of Leonidas soon after his death?34 The poem would then be a thrēnos for the king.35 Yet this interpretation would reinstate many difficulties. The opening lines of the passage would take on a curious flavour: the turn from lamentation to remembrance, and from pity to praise, would be strangely juxtaposed with thousands of wailing and self-mutilating mourners. Moreover, the weight of praise would shift dominantly towards the king and destroy the careful balance between the group and its sovereign.36 Quite apart from passionate lament, we would also have to picture our mourners declaring ritualistically that Leonidas was the best king ever. Convention would overwhelm the transcendence of the soldiers’ and the king’s achievement.
If, however, we distance the performance of the ode from the royal funeral, we can see it as a successful meditation on the king and the Three Hundred, and a mediation as well. The funeral rites of normal Spartans were reserved, and the Three Hundred, with the exception of Maron and Alpheios, were not heroised and recipients of cult.37 The funerals of Spartan kings, on the other hand, were marked by heroic honours and the claim that the dead king was aristos, the best of those who had come before. In these circumstances, the mention of metaphorical altars and attendants in the case of the Three Hundred, and the lack of reference to the same in the case of Leonidas, is interesting. It is as if the Three Hundred take on some of Leonidas’ cultic aura – not mentioned in the case of Leonidas himself, since this would have been nothing out of the ordinary for a Spartan king. The heroic status of Leonidas, on the other hand, is doubly determined. He enjoys it not only as a king of Sparta, but also as one who has achieved eternal fame by his actions.38 His role as king makes him an authoritative witness for his soldiers, and this is why Simonides specifies his title in l. 8. Calling Leonidas ‘King of Sparta’ has seemed empty to some: surely everyone in the years following Thermopylae would have known who Leonidas was, and the title is an intrusive gloss?39 Yet evoking a person’s title is more than a matter of giving information to those present at the performance. To call someone ‘king’ has its own glamour and resonance: Pindar calls Hieron of Syracuse the ‘Syracusan king who delights in horses’ (Ol. 1.21), even though the audience of his poem would all have known who Hieron was.40 And Spartan kingship was, as we have seen, something special, something to be explicitly evoked in each subsequent performance. The poem evokes yet displaces Leonidas from the realm of ritual lamentation given to the king, and shifts him into a quasi-Homeric register. From his position of eminence, he guarantees the correctness of the praise given to the Three Hundred, and bequeaths to them a transformed version of heroic honours. This song of praise carefully balances the heroism of king and soldiers: the achievements of each inform those of the other.
What was the genre of the poem? It is impossible to be sure in the state of our current knowledge. If the interpretation advanced here is correct, it is unlikely to have been a thrēnos, since the poet is attempting to transcend mourning for praise. If we take Diodorus’ use of ‘encomium’ loosely, this seems about right. This is a song of praise that could have been performed on a variety of occasions, just as the Spartans sang the songs of Tyrtaeus repeatedly at the Gymnopaidia. Indeed, the transcendence of lamentation and the movement towards immortal fame are most effective if we imagine multiple reperformances. For a first performance, it is tempting to imagine a broadly based celebration, perhaps in Sparta. The Spartans awarded aristeia (prizes for valour) to their soldiers, and such a ceremony might be appropriate, but better still would be an occasion that singled no one out – a more open sort of occasion might indeed work better.41 There will have been many such opportunities for commemoration after the war. Podlecki, for example, thought of Themistocles’ Spartan visit (see further below) as a suitable occasion, and although his reconstruction as a whole has something of the fantastic about it (Themistocles taking the ode with him as a kind of present for the Spartans), reconstructing an occasion of this type has merit.42 Any public occasion in the aftermath of the wars will have brought to the surface issues of comparative excellence on the part of individuals and polities. Simonides’ Thermopylae ode shows, I have argued, considerable finesse in balancing the claims of king and soldiers, while making the battle as a whole the standard of glory against which subsequent contenders will have to measure themselves.43
One of those other contenders was Themistocles, with whom Simonides enjoyed a relationship of some intimacy. Plutarch mentions the connection between them several times in his Life, citing Simonides as a source for Themistocles’ restoration and decoration of the telesterion of the Lycomidai (1.4), as well as for the Greek (and Themistoclean) achievements at Salamis (15.4), and narrating anecdotes about their interaction (5.6–7). At issue here is the second of these citations, the climax of Plutarch’s account of the Battle of Salamis (Plut. Them. 15.4):
οἱ δ’ ἄλλοι τοῖς βαρβάροις ἐξισούμενοι τò πλῆθος ἐν στενῷ κατὰ μέρος προσφερομένους καὶ περιπίπτοντας ἀλλήλοις ἐτρέψαντο μέχρι δείλης ἀντισχόντας, ὥσπερ εἴρηκε Σιμωνίδης, τὴν καλὴν ἐκείνην καὶ περιβόητον ἀράμενοι νίκην, ἧς οὔθ’ Ἕλλησιν οὔτε βαρβάροις ἐνάλιον ἔργον εἴργασται λαμπρότερον, ἀνδρείᾳ μὲν καὶ προθυμίᾳ κοινῇ τῶν ναυμαχησάντων, γνώμῃ δὲ καὶ δεινότητι τῇ Θεμιστοκλέους.
The rest (of the Greeks) equalling the barbarians in numbers – since those were attacking in detachments and colliding with each other in the strait – put them to flight although they held out until evening, as Simonides says, and won that fair and famous victory than which no more brilliant deed by sea has been done either by Greeks or barbarians, won by the common courage and eagerness of all who fought in the sea battle, but also by the judgement and cleverness of Themistocles.
To what Simonidean poem could Plutarch be referring? The Suda, that notoriously problematic source, tells us that Simonides wrote a lyric poem on the sea battle at Salamis, although this has often been disbelieved, and several elegiac fragments have been associated with this poem.44 The existence of a separate Simonidean poem on Salamis has even been doubted altogether.45 Some phrases of Plutarch’s narration do sound poetic, and various attempts have been made to extract candidates for lyric or elegiac phrases.46 We cannot, however, be certain about the nature of Simonides’ poem, nor can we securely identify anything in Plutarch as Simonidean.47 His text could be mostly paraphrase. Nevertheless, there is no good reason to doubt that Plutarch is looking to a Simonidean treatment of the battle, and that he is engaging in at least a paraphrase of the Simonidean original, with various phrases perhaps originating in the poem itself.48 The previous section on the exploits of Lycomedes the Athenian, to another branch of whose clan, the Lycomidai, Themistocles probably belonged, may have owed its presence in the narrative to some confusion on Plutarch’s part;49 but whatever its source it shows that Plutarch’s focus was shifting to Greek heroism (and Lycomedes’) as he reached the climax of his narrative. This shift brought Simonides’ Salamis material to the fore. Whatever its precise generic affiliation, then, the poem would have said that the Greeks engaged the Persians in the straits, that the Persians held out until evening, that the Greeks won a renowned victory (the most glorious nautical deed ever recorded), that all who fought displayed great courage, but that a special place had to be given to the tactical judgement of Themistocles.
Of particular interest here is Plutarch’s collocation of ἀνδρείᾳ μὲν καὶ προθυμίᾳ κοινῇ τῶν ναυμαχησάντων and γνώμῃ δὲ καὶ δεινότητι τῇ Θεμιστοκλέους: the victory was ‘won by the common courage and eagerness of all … but also by the judgement and cleverness of Themistocles’. There is a significant recurrence here of that interesting nexus of individual and collective that we saw in the Thermopylae poem. Of course the battle was a universal Hellenic triumph. Of course it was achieved by Greek courage. But there was another factor in play: the contribution of Themistocles. His judgement and cleverness were crucial. One might look again to Hyperides’ assertion quoted previously that praise of Leosthenes also counts as praise for the other citizen soldiers: ‘for the general is responsible for good counsel, but the victory belongs to those who are willing to risk their bodies in the fight’. Yet once again, I think that the flavour of Simonides, to the extent that we can catch an evanescent taste of it in Plutarch, is different. Themistocles comes as the cap, which is unsurprising in a biography of him; but even in the lost original, mention of him would have been noteworthy. The rhetoric of ‘the most glorious deed’ effected by sea creates monumental glory for the Greeks, but Themistocles is associated with that glory and made its intellectual architect. The achievement of the collective and the individual is juxtaposed and balanced in a way that rings true to the complex negotiations for prestige that characterised the years after the war.50
The extent of Themistocles’ contribution to the Salamis effort was very much in the air shortly after Salamis. Herodotus (8.123–4) tells us that after the division of the booty, the Greeks sailed to the Isthmus in order to give the prize of excellence (ἀριστήια) to the most worthy. All the generals cast their votes for first and second place on the altar of Poseidon, and each cast his vote for himself, since each thought that he himself was the best (aristos), but the majority agreed in awarding the second prize to Themistocles. Thus the prize was not awarded, but Themistocles still had the reputation throughout all of Greece of being the wisest man by far. Themistocles was upset, and decided to pay a visit to Sparta, where he was greatly honoured. As a prize of excellence (aristeia) the Spartans gave to Eurybiades (their own admiral) a crown of olive, but to Themistocles too they gave a crown of olive for wisdom and cleverness (sophiē and dexiotēs). They praised him and presented him with the finest carriage in Sparta. Note that the Spartans kept the prize of overall excellence for one of their own, but were happy to give a special achievement award to Themistocles, recognising his wisdom and cleverness, just as Simonides may have spoken of his judgement and shrewdness. Unfortunately for Themistocles, his popularity among his native Athenians did not long endure. His foundation of a shrine of Artemis Aristoboulē (‘Artemis of the Best Counsel’) fits perfectly with a programme of stressing his intellectual contribution to the Greek cause. It seems, however, to have been an irritation, and Plutarch (Them. 22.1–2) also tells us that the Athenians got tired of being endlessly reminded of his benefactions. He was ostracised probably around 471 BCE. After spending time agitating in Argos, he was implicated by the Spartans in the medism of Pausanias and condemned at Athens.51 Unlike Leonidas, he had no institutional status comparable to that of a king which could absorb the flood of glory and direct it into pre-existing channels; and Athens was, of all cities, perhaps the least receptive to glorifying individual generals. It was a place where the honour of the collective had to trump all other considerations.52 An elegiac fragment, again by Simonides (fr. 86 W2) shows the poet toeing the official line when the Muse is invoked in the hexameter to honour the one who is the best (aristos), and then in the pentameter the audience learns that it is the dēmos of the Athenians alone that has achieved this kind of excellence.53
Again and again, the language of superlative achievement obtrudes itself. No more brilliant deed than Salamis has ever been achieved. The Athenian dēmos alone is the best. After Salamis, Themistocles wants to be recognised as the best, and founds a shrine of Artemis of the Best Counsel. We shall see shortly that Pausanias’ victory at Plataea is described as ‘the fairest victory of all those we know.’ For all the good will and Panhellenic feeling that undoubtedly circulated in the 470s BCE, there was clearly also much active discussion of whose contribution and which battle had been the most decisive.54 Leonidas, who died in action and whose battle was a glorious defeat, was a special case, but Themistocles was an active participant in the sweepstakes. He was ultimately unsuccessful. His glory would probably have lasted longer had he, like Leonidas, died in the moment of his superlative achievement, or if he had been as diplomatic as I have argued Simonides was in the Salamis poem, balancing his claim to fame with acknowledgement of the achievements of the group. The traces of the poem we see in Plutarch thus register an intensely fraught moment, both in terms of elite competition and in terms of the recognition of elite performance by the collective.
Themistocles’ presence in the Salamis poem, though likely, must remain conjectural. Fortunately this is not the case with the final commander under consideration here: Pausanias, regent of Sparta and commander of the Greek forces at the Battle of Plataea. He was the single Greek most associated with the victory there, and was thus a major player in the high-stakes game of ‘who has won the greatest victory?’ played in the 470s BCE by assorted Greek commanders. Like Themistocles, Pausanias experienced difficulties in the decade after the end of the war. Once the Greeks had beaten the Persians on the mainland, Pausanias remained in charge, but his actions in the northern Aegean alienated the allies. He is supposed to have behaved in a quasi-tyrannical fashion (Thuc. 1.94). He was recalled to Sparta probably in 477 BCE, acquitted of illegal behaviour and then returned to the Hellespont, where, the story goes, he medised. Recalled to Sparta again, he died in disgrace after having given rise to the curse of the Brazen House (Thuc. 1.131–4). In the months immediately following the victory, however, Pausanias was at the height of his glory, still the influential leader of the entire Greek alliance. This was the time (479–478 BCE?) during which Simonides composed the elegiac verses on the Battle of Plataea whose fragments are collected in W2 (frr. 10–18). In these verses Pausanias receives explicit honorific mention; they are therefore a good place to explore how Simonides contextualises Pausanias within the Greek forces.
I am interested primarily in ll. 13–34 of fr. 11 W2. According to a plausible reconstruction, the poem begins with the death of Achilles as a kind of hymnic proem.55 In ll. 15–18 we learn that those who fought in the Trojan War have achieved eternal fame because of Homer. At ll. 20–1, Simonides calls on the Muse as he makes a transition to the heroes of Plataea. These men do something at or for Sparta (maybe they ward off the day of slavery). They remember their excellence, and their kleos will be immortal (ll. 25–8). The Spartans leave Lacedaemonia accompanied by the Tyndaridai (possibly present as images).56 Men who are leaders of their ancestral city are mentioned in the next line, and in l. 33 someone who is labelled ἄριστος, best, leads them out. At the end of l. 34 we are given his name, Pausanias. We then move on to Corinth and Megara, and it seems likely that we are presented with an account of the march north to Plataea by the Spartans as they pick up allied contingents along the way. Precise details are unrecoverable, but we can at least be sure that Pausanias was named and that he was called ἄριστος, the best – or ‘most noble’, as West would have it.
This rich text has generated much interpretation in the last twenty years. Here we shall focus on the question of group dynamics and the place of the individual within the group. The first issue must be the nature and focalisation of the group. Assessments have varied. For some the verses are unquestionably a Panhellenic document, while for others they exhibit an obvious Spartan or Peloponnesian bias. A Panhellenic approach sees the poem as memorialising all the Greeks who fought against the Persians, and finds support in the fact that Plutarch cites the poem as an example of unbiased reporting.57 Several cities apart from Sparta are mentioned during the march: the poet speaks of the Megarid and probably the ‘land of Pandion’, that is, Attica. As Boedeker comments, the Spartans dominate the preserved fragments, but they are by no means alone.58 This reading gives us a picture of the united Greeks facing a common enemy. Just as Homer immortalised the Greeks who fought at Troy, so Simonides will do the same thing for those who died at Plataea. This vision of a heroic Greek community in turn influences the way we evaluate the function of Achilles in the elegy. Just as no particular community is privileged in our interpretation, so Achilles becomes a model for all those who made victory possible, not just one man.59 Similarly, we find the suggestion that the cult status of Achilles is meant to model, or at least may allude to, heroic status for the dead of Plataea.60
A more epichoric approach, on the other hand, focuses on Spartan domination, and in particular on the two lines that seem to have been devoted to Pausanias. Although the Spartans are not alone in the poem, they do seem to get the most space, and in a later fragment (fr. 13 W2) we hear of the sons of Doros and Heracles opposite the Medes and the Persians, which certainly evokes a Spartan context. When it comes to the question of Achilles, the issue becomes the extent to which one can make a single fighter representative of the many. Carlo Odo Pavese, for example, canvassing the possibility that Achilles is representative of the Spartan dead at Plataea, points out that Achilles was one and the dead many; and that they died in the hour of victory but that he did not.61 Achilles must, therefore, be the exemplar for an individual. Who could this individual be? For most the solution is provided by the one historical character whose name is preserved in the poem, Pausanias the son of Cleombrotus.62
This choice between Panhellenic and epichoric scenarios also influences the way we envision the occasion of the poem. Panhellenic readings imagine a festival at the Isthmus, or the Eleutheria festival at Plataea, or even Delphi, whereas those in favour of some sort of Spartan commission can then imagine a performance at Sparta. Or, in an extreme version, we can imagine, with Albert Schachter, performance at the tomb of Achilles on the Hellespont, presided over by Pausanias shortly before the allied attack on Byzantion in spring or summer of 478 BCE, in front of a captive audience of allied troops.63 But perhaps we should not rush to make choices of performance scenario with polarising implications. The original audience, no less than we, would have been alert to issues of dominance, pre-eminence, heroism and equality. Even the most parochial of occasions would have had ambitions for its version of commemoration to have circulated widely, making broad claims for Panhellenic pre-eminence. Although I have no new suggestions about the performance location, it does seem to me likely that the audience was a broad one, not uniquely or dominantly Spartan: that it was, in a real sense, Panhellenic. Yet it also seems true that in the lines which are preserved, the action is focalised through the Spartans. This does not mean that the poem is a eulogy for Sparta, nor that the prominence given to Pausanias was ‘the kind of thing which got him into trouble over the offering at Delphi’ (an issue to which we shall return).64 We can say that the poem is focalised through the Spartans and still imagine that it has a Panhellenic ethic and goal. Later in the decade, it caused the Athenians no distress to acknowledge that Plataea was a victory of the Dorian spear (Aesch. Pers. 816–17), and we remember that the Spartans were generous in the honours they paid to Themistocles. Sparta was the acknowledged leader of the Greek alliance, and would have wanted to consolidate that leadership. This meant acknowledging the contribution of others while still claiming the greatest credit.
The collective in question here is thus one that consists of all the Greeks, although the verses give us the most information about the Spartans, and the relationship between Pausanias and the larger group remains unspecified. This in turn brings us back to Achilles. How far over the group does his heroic lustre extend? What is the relationship between him and the rest of the Greeks at Troy? He is the object of second-person address here, but they are not (a consequence of the quasi-hymnic nature of the proem). The second-person narrative of his death is followed by a distancing move, as the poet wraps up the events of the Trojan War: the Greeks sacked Troy and went home (fr. 11.13 W2).65 The parallel is at least partly between two sets of victorious Greeks who returned home to fame. Homer poured fame upon them and made the short-lived race of demi-gods famous to those who came after (ll. 17–18). Then, as if the epithet okumoron reminds him of the son of Thetis, the speaker returns to Achilles to say his farewell salutation.66 Achilles, however, is treated as alive and present (perhaps because of his widespread cult). There is, then, a difference between the treatment accorded to Achilles and the rest of the ‘generation of demigods’. Achilles is not necessarily exemplary for all those who fought at Troy, or even for all the demigods.67 He is a special case (even though he too was a demigod).
Simonides’ evocation of Homer and the heroes of the Trojan War focuses on the heroic leaders of the Greek expedition. This may well be the point of saying that Homer poured fame over the ἁγέμαχοι Δαναοί in l. 14 of the elegy. If we accept this reading, the Danaans are qualified as ‘leaders in battle’. The doricising epithet could be understood as a compliment to Dorian martial valour, or more conventionally be thought to apply to all the Danaans who fought at Troy.68 Yet if we press the meaning, we find that once again it brings problems of leadership to the fore. The Danaans, leaders in battle, sacked Ilium and won deathless fame. It would be true to say that Homer immortalised the leaders of the Greeks, but not indeed most of the rank and file. It is the race of demi-gods that gets the fame. As Peter Parsons noted, the epithet could distinguish the commanders from the rank and file.69 Something quite subtle is being effected here – a kind of blurring between the various participants. The heroic Greeks are given epithets that remind us of Achilles (such as ‘swift-fated’ and ‘outstanding’), even as Achilles himself receives a narratologically different treatment. They win deathless glory, but the precise make-up of the group that wins it is unclear (depending, I have argued, on how far one cares to press ‘leaders in battle’).
The Trojan model was not without difficulties for a poet who wanted to glorify all the fighters of Plataea, but it was also full of opportunities for making subtle distinctions and meaningful transformations. It is thus significant that when Simonides comes to the fighters of Plataea at ll. 24–5, he calls them first of all ‘men’ (reading ἀνδρῶ]ν), then says that the report of their deeds ‘reaches heaven’, and that they too have won deathless glory (27–8). In this first introduction, no distinction is made between various contingents in the Greek forces. It is perfectly right to see this as a fulfilment of much that is implicit in Tyrtaeus, and as a forerunner of the ideology of the epitaphios logos. The Trojan model has been, at least partly, superseded: fame is now more broad-based, as the picture of Achilles standing out among a group of heroes is replaced by one of the Greeks united under the leadership of Sparta. Yet even though the fighters at Plataea get the kleos of the heroic generation, we can ask if the Homeric precedent lingers in the rest of the poem. What becomes of the ‘leaders in battle’ after the proem?
In fact, the blurring of structures of leadership continues as the march from Sparta begins. In l. 29, ‘they’ (οἳ μέν (restored)) leave the city accompanied by local heroes. Line 32, part of the same sentence, gives us another nominative plural in apposition, calling them the ‘leaders’ (hēgemones) of their ancestral city. Lines 33–4, the second part of the sentence, put them in the accusative and give us a new subject, Pausanias, who led the Spartans out. Here is West’s restored text with his translation (fr. 11.29–34 W2):
οἳ μὲν ἄρ’ Εὐ]ρώτ̣αν κα[ὶ Σπάρτη]ς ἄστυ λιπόντ[ες
ὥρμησαν] Ζηνòς παισὶ σὺν ἱπποδάμοις
Τυνδαρίδα]ι̣ς ἥρωσι καὶ εὐρυβίηι Μενελάω[ι
… . . πατ]ρ̣ώιης ἡγεμόνες π[ό]λ̣εος,
τοὺς δ’ υἱòς θείοιο Κλεο]μ̣β̣[ρ]ότ̣ου ἔξ̣[α]γ’ ἄριστ[ος
. ]αγ̣ . Παυσανίης.
[From the Eu]rotas and from [Sparta’s] town they [marched,]
accompanied by Zeus’ horsemaster sons,
[the Tyndarid] Heroes, and by Menelaus’ strength,
[those doughty] captains of [their fath]ers’ folk,
led forth by [great Cleo]mbrotus’ most noble [son,]
… Pausanias.
(trans. West 1993b: 169)
It seems that it is Pausanias who leads the hēgemones, the leaders. This is historically appropriate, since, as Herodotus (9.10) tells us, Pausanias was regent for Pleistarchus (son of Leonidas). Technically then, the hēgemoniē was Pleistarchus’; Pausanias had in any case associated his cousin Euryanax with himself in the command. The hēgemones could, therefore, be the three of them together. It is also possible that the term includes the Spartan divisional commanders.70 Parsons notes that hēgemones is ‘a (deliberately?) unspecific term’.71 This lack of specificity is interesting, and it is tempting to say that it replicates to some extent the earlier unclarity of hāgemachoi. If West’s reconstruction is correct, the scope of the verbal subject narrows as the narrative progresses, since it should be the hēgemones who are the subject of the previous verb: the ones who left Sparta. Or should we say that all those who left Sparta are treated as hēgemones, as a matter of convention, or because Sparta held the hegemony in the alliance? The problem here is partly the fragmentary nature of the text, but the difficulty in identifying leaders may be symptomatic of a tactful poetic lack of clarity that allows us to imagine the fraught category of leadership in a variety of different ways. Nevertheless, whatever the uncertainties as we move away from the group in l. 25, the end of this process of focusing is clear. Once all have been assured their fame, we are given the aristos, the one who is the best: Pausanias. One would dearly like to know what came in the first part of l. 34, but even without that, Pausanias is the one who emerges from a cloudy group of leaders in battle and is named – but named because the cloud of glory has already been generously diffused over others. Achilles is the analogue for Pausanias, the named hero who is set apart because of his special mystique and charisma. Both are, however, carefully integrated into the larger context of the force in which they served.
It is, therefore, incorrect to see the poem as a puff piece for Pausanias. We must insist that the two poles of individual and collective are held in tension – a tension that is not debilitating but productive.72 If we want to imagine what poetry glorifying Pausanias alone looks like, we only have to glance at the two epigrams for Pausanias (sometimes attributed to Simonides) associated with dedications at Delphi and the Black Sea. Of the one at Delphi, Thucydides (1.132.2–3) tells us that he thought it right to have inscribed on his own account on the tripod at Delphi, which the Greeks dedicated as the first-fruits of the spoil of their victory over the Medes, this couplet (= XVII FGE (a)):
Ἑλλήνων ἀρχηγòς ἐπεὶ στρατòν ὤλεσε Μήδων
Παυσανίας Φοίβῳ μνῆμ’ ἀνέθηκε τόδε.
The leader of the Greeks, after he destroyed the host of the Medes,
Pausanias, dedicated this monument to Phoebus.
The Spartans erased the couplet immediately, and inscribed the names of the cities that had joined in overthrowing the barbarian. Pausanias also dedicated a large bowl at the entrance to the Black Sea.73 Athenaeus (12.536a–b) reports that Pausanias inscribed his own name on a pre-existing offering in the following epigram (XXXIX FGE):
μνᾶμ’ ἀρετᾶς ἀνέθηκε Ποσειδάωνι ἄνακτι
Παυσανίας, ἄρχων Ἑλλάδος εὐρυχόρου,
πόντου ἐπ’ Εὐξείνου, Λακεδαιμόνιος γένος, υἱòς
Κλεομβρότου, ἀρχαίας Ἡρακλέος γενεᾶς.
Pausanias, ruler of Greece with its wide spaces,
dedicated to Lord Poseidon a memorial of his excellence
at the Euxine Sea – a Lacedaimonian by race, son
of Cleombrotus, from the ancient lineage of Heracles.
We should note how extreme these two epigrams are, compared with the verses in the Plataea elegy. Pausanias is now the ‘leader of the Greeks’ or the ‘ruler of Greece’. No wonder the allies were upset. Parsons comments on l. 36 of the elegy that there is no room for Euryanax or Pleistarchus, and then adds, ‘in the same spirit, Pausanias put his name alone to the Delphic Dedication’.74 Other commentators, too, draw a connection between the vainglorious epigrams and the mention of Pausanias in the elegy: Schachter goes so far as to say of the elegy that ‘a poem singling out Pausanias for praise would have offended many Spartans’ and thus locates the performance in Asia.75 Yet the differences between the epigrams and the elegy are striking and we should be cautious of drawing a straight line between the two. Pausanias does not, in the elegy as preserved, receive the title of ‘leader’ or ‘ruler’, although we do hear that he led the host. He is called the ‘best’, but he is not the only one who displays his excellence. The whole point is that Simonides does not single Pausanias out for praise. This was the person who won, as Herodotus (9.64) tells us, ‘the fairest victory of all those we know’.76 Even the hapless Plataeans later in the century, trying to extract themselves from a sticky Spartan situation early in the Peloponnesian War, can say that Pausanias sacrificed to Zeus after Plataea, having freed Greece from the Medes (Thuc. 2.71). Far from being guilty of a heavy-handed attempt to steal the limelight for Pausanias, Simonides impresses us with his delicacy (always bearing in mind that certainty is impossible, given that the account of the battle itself is missing). Pausanias led the Greeks and is aristos: an attribution of aristeia that was the goal of every Greek commander in the wake of the Persian Wars, but that comes as the end of an extensive development of the language of leadership and generous praise for all.
If we compare the Plataea elegy with the Thermopylae poem we see, doubtless, a difference. Boedeker suggested that the comparison shows how great the difference could be between lyric and elegiac tone in battle poems, and saw it as one of historical credibility. We can add that the sacral note present in the Thermopylae poem is absent in its Plataea counterpart. Yet the difference is also predicated by the character of the celebrations. The Thermopylae poem focuses on the dead, but the Plataea poem includes the living as well, those who have to go home and make the difficult transition from heroes to citizens. In the case of Pausanias, he went from commander and hero to regent and placeholder for a young king whose very status meant that he, Pleistoanax, would be celebrated by default as aristos at his funeral. Still, the Plataea elegy is in some ways more like the Thermopylae poem than Pausanias’ dedicatory epigrams. Both poems (in their current state) balance commander against troops, and the Plataea poem is even more discreet than its Thermopylean counterpart. This very discretion makes it difficult to decide whether the original performance context would have been a Panhellenic festival, a funeral, a ceremony of universal thanksgiving or a (literally) command performance at Sigeion, with the wretched members of the Greek alliance metaphorically chained to their seats under the watchful eye of Pausanias’ heavies.
Simonides displays considerable artistry in preserving the claims of outstanding individuals to leadership and pre-eminent glory, while also taking those they commanded to the brink of poetic immortality. It is not enough to affirm or deny that his poems express a ‘Panhellenic’ ethos. A shared sense of Greek identity may well have operated during and after the Persian Wars, but a prevailing feeling of harmony would not have cancelled attempts to occupy a privileged position within the alliance (as Herodotus’ narrative frequently shows). Not only were individual cities bent on asserting their right to glory, but the same was true of Greek commanders. We can see this explicitly in Timocreon of Rhodes’ parodic survey of the Greek commanders (PMG 727), which considers the claims to praise of Pausanias, Xanthippus, Leotychidas, Aristides and Themistocles (much to the detriment of this last). Of course, the civic identity of a commander had implications for his city. Each city and each commander would have asserted that their motives and actions were Panhellenically motivated (if they had known the word); but the devil, as always, is in the details. Panhellenism was not a simple and well-defined notion, but a complex triangulation of the interests of individuals and cities. It was under construction as Simonides was composing the works examined here, and his poetry helps to construct it. When that poetry pushes the claims of Athens or Sparta and their generals he demonstrates how Panhellenic claims were filtered through a local and even a personal lens. Finding a poetic and a political place for victorious commanders was a pressing need: their achievements needed to be accommodated within a communal framework and correctly contextualised in order for their cities, and Greece in general, to move forward. This picture of negotiation and complexity muddies the waters of the stream of Panhellenic praise. We may lose some clarity, but we will at least get a better sense of the turbulence of the current.77
1 See Kurke 1991.
2 Loraux 1986, Vernant 1990.
3 Vernant 1990: 56: ‘l’avènement de la représentation figurée de certains morts correspond au moment où les valeurs aristocratiques sont déjà intégrées à la communauté civique, où la belle mort du jeune guerrier est déjà dévouement hoplitique, sans qu’elles soient entièrement absorbées dans le domaine politique. C’est sur ce point que les texts de Callinos and de Tyrtée sont éclairants. Le combatant est nimbé d’héroïsme parce qu’il risque et donne sa vie pour sa patrie; il est l’object de póthos de toute la cité, et pas seulement des siens, mais il a gardé son individualité …’ The emphasis in the English translation is mine.
4 For a recent treatment of the problem of Simonidean epigram, see Petrovic 2007; cf. also Higbie 2010: 185–6 (on the Persian War epigrams).
5 Poltera 2008: 210–12 (text), 467–78 (commentary).
6 Steiner 1999: 384–8; Wiater 2005: 44–5 similarly sees the σηκός in l. 6 as a ‘virtual heroon’. Cf. West 1970: 210–11. Ferrarini 2014: 371–3 argues that the sēkos is the Agiad burial ground in Sparta.
7 Steiner 1999: 385. The notion of a good reputation as a fine shroud recurs in Plutarch’s introduction to another fragment of Simonidean lyric (Plut. An seni 1.783e = PMG 594 = 305 Poltera). Burzacchini 1977: 31 attempts to attach the fragment to the Thermopylae poem, and sees Plutarch’s comments on the ‘fine shroud’ as a paraphrase of PMG 531. Citti 1987: 11–12 would include the ‘fine shroud’ as part of Plutarch’s quote and speculates that the idea was (or became) a commonplace.
8 Dillery 1996: 247–8.
9 For the enjambment here, see Lomiento 2014: 430.
10 Arsenius Apostolius (1468–1538), a Greek scholar resident in Venice (for the textual emendation, see p. 342 Walz). See discussion in Poltera 2008: 477.
11 Palmisciano 1996: 48–50, Podlecki 1968: 261.
12 Poltera 2008: 468.
13 West 1967; West 1975: 309 suggested that (i) the line is stylistically prosaic because of the prepositional phrase being inserted between the article and the participle; that (ii) because l. 7 runs μαρτυρεῖ δὲ καὶ Λεωνίδας the opening lines must be general in their reference and cannot refer to the dead at Thermopylae (cf. West 1970: 210 and 1975: 309); and that (iii) the opening entails an unfortunate mixture of dactylo-epitrite and aeolic cola (cf. West 1975: 308–9). Ranged against him were Page 1971 and Lloyd-Jones 1974, who found nothing prosaic or metrically objectionable in the line. I accept the metrical arrangement suggested by Dale 1951: 119–20 (who deletes καί but prefers a version of the text that differs only slightly from what Page published in PMG). As Poltera 2008: 468 admits, none of West’s stylistic arguments is decisive. The question turns, therefore, on a satisfactory interpretation of the relationship between Leonidas and the larger group of the Three Hundred. Poltera, as we have seen, joins West in considering the first line to be intrusive: unlike West, he treats it as a title for the entire composition.
14 Poltera 2008: 469.
15 Kegel 1962: 92. So also Ferrarini 2014: 374–5.
16 Loraux 1986: 44. Cf. Ferrarini 2014: 380–1.
17 Cf. Steiner 1999: 392–3, Poltera 2008: 470.
18 Palmisciano 1996: 50; cf. Poltera 2008: 471.
19 Text by Herrman 2009: 42.
20 Cf. Steiner 1999: 389 n. 36, observing that in the early part of the fifth century BCE the ethos of the aristeia survives alongside that of the anonymous citizen (and also citing Vernant; see n. 3 above). Indeed, Eur. Andr. 693–8 shows that the eminence of the commanding officer and the praise he received continued to be an issue at the end of the century.
21 Dillery 1996: 247–8.
22 Cf. Budelmann 2018: 209. On the validating power of Leonidas’ heroism, see also Dillery 1996: 247–8.
23 Steiner 1999: 386 n. 19, while registering Pindaric parallels at Ol. 9.98–9 and 13.108, acknowledges the imprecision of the fit. For Steiner, it is an issue of ringing the changes on a conventional form, while I would dispute the relevance of these parallels altogether.
24 So Bowra 1933: 281.
25 Pindar translations are my own.
26 Carson 1992: 55–7 (assuming a cenotaph for Leonidas) suggests, along with Fränkel 1973: 320, that Leonidas is witness of his own fame and stands, as it were, in apposition to himself. On my reading of the poem, however, the weakness of logic disappears.
27 Bowra 1933: 281.
28 As Podlecki 1968: 259 pointed out.
29 See Paus. 3.12.8 for Eurypontid graves, and 3.14.2 for the tombs of the Agiad kings. For the re-burial of Leonidas’ remains at Sparta, see Paus. 3.14.1.
30 Unless we believe Podlecki’s reconstruction (1968: 274–5) that in fact it was the regent Pausanias (rather than a later one) who brought the body back to Sparta at the end of the 470s, a scenario supported recently by Ferrarini 2014: 376–7. For further discussion, see Richer 1994: 74–5 n. 135, who is inclined to trust Pausanias’ forty-year gap between Leonidas’ death and the repatriation of his corpse.
31 Scott 2005: 249–50.
32 Cartledge 2006: 162–3.
33 So previously Richer 1994: 75–6, who imagines, perhaps correctly, that Herodotus or his source were influenced by the supposed immutability of Spartan customs. Richer 1994: 76–80 understands the role of the εἴδωλον as one of attracting to Sparta the protective force of the dead king, who is subsequently buried in the city centre like a founder.
34 So Palmisciano 1996: 51–2.
35 Cf. Carey (this volume).
36 Cf. Poltera 2008: 471.
37 Despite the arguments of Currie 2005: 96–102. Cf. Wiater’s conclusion (2005: 47) that the poem heroises the fallen, since they did not receive actual hero cult.
38 Cf. the comments of Richer 1994: 95, who does not examine this poem but who also sees in Leonidas a figure who ‘a associé à son charisme propre, dû à l’exercice des fonctions royales, la valeur du combatant mort de façon idéale’.
39 Poltera 2008: 469.
40 Cf. Wiater 2005: 47.
41 So Steiner 1999: 394–5.
42 Podlecki 1968: 274.
43 It is interesting to speculate on the possible connection of P.Oxy. XXXII.2623 fr. 1 (PMG 519 fr. 132 = SLG S 319 = Poltera 34) with the Thermopylae poem and with the problems under consideration here. This fragment mentions two names connected with the Spartan royal house of the Eurypontids (Zeuxidamos in l. 6 and Hippokratidas in l. 11), and refers to fighting (by a plural subject: μάρ[ν]α̣ντο, l. 5), the din of battle and a crown, and also to receiving a sceptre. Most commentators agree that this is an epinician, since other fragments from the same papyrus fit comfortably into this genre (but see Ucciardello 2007: 13–14 for the possibility that the roll may have contained poems of different genres, such as epinician and paean). Whatever the genre, the preserved verses do seem to stress military action and Spartan royal lineage (cf. Barrigón Fuentes 2008: 50). Poltera 2008: 347 connects the Zeuxidamos of the papyrus with the son of Leotychidas, the commander of the Greek fleet at Mycale (although, as Cartledge 2002: 294–6 points out, an earlier Zeuxidamos might also be in question). Once again there is a possibility that we see here, too, the juxtaposition of a commanding individual with a larger collective analysed in 531 PMG = 261 Poltera.
44 Rutherford 2001a: 35–8, Podlecki 1968: 268–72. The verses are: (1) XIX FGE (a), memorialising the role played by Democritos of Naxos at the Battle of Salamis, attributed to Simonides by Plutarch De malig. Herod. 36.869c; and (2) fr. 86 W2, reported by the scholion on Ar. Pax 736ff. On the latter, see now Rawles 2013, arguing that the lines come from an Athenian elegy celebrating Salamis or Artemision. For a discussion of the difficulties associated with the testimony of the Suda, see Kowerski 2005: 4–16, 33–9.
45 Kowerski 2005: 34–6.
46 Poltera 2008: 423 suggests περιβόητον ἀράμενοι νίκην for a lyric context, and ἐνάλιον ἔργον εἴργασται λαμπρότερον for an elegiac one. Podlecki 1968: 267 put forward μέχρι δείλης ἀντισχόντας on the grounds that it would fit into a hexameter line, and tentatively advanced Themistocles’ name for the same reason.
47 Rutherford 2001a: 37, Poltera 2008: 422.
48 Poltera 2008: 422–3 asserts that Aeschylus’ Persians is Plutarch’s main source for the battle (especially at Them. 15.4, for which he cites Pers. 413 and 428). This overstates the matter. Plutarch evidently used multiple sources for the battle and its associated events, including Aeschylus, Herodotus, Phanodemos and Phanias of Lesbos, and by no means is his narrative predominantly Aeschylean. It is certainly true that Aeschylus’ phrase πλῆθος ἐν στενῷ νεῶν (Pers. 413) is picked up by Plutarch’s ἐξισούμενοι τὸ πλῆθος ἐν στενῷ, although πλῆθος serves a different grammatical function in the two sentences (cf. also Frost 1980: 159). Yet Pers. 428 (lamentation continuing until nightfall) is no real parallel for μέχρι δείλης ἀντισχόντας (‘holding out until evening’). That the ships engaged in the narrows and that the battle lasted until nightfall was traditional knowledge, and μέχρι δείλης ἀντισχόντας is as likely (more likely?) to reflect Simonides as Aeschylus.
49 Frost 1980: 159, Marr 1998: 110–11.
50 Cf. Higbie 2010: 190, Morgan 2015: 133–62.
51 Thuc. 1.135, Plut. Them. 23.
52 As we see in the Eion epigrams and Aeschines’ citation of them at In Ctes. 183–5. Cf. Hornblower 2001: 138.
53 See the discussion of Rawles (n. 44 above).
54 It is surely in this light that we must read Herodotus’ (7.139) famous declaration that the Athenians were the saviours of Greece. For an argument that this same discourse of superlatives lies behind Pindar’s assessment of the Deinomenid contribution to the war effort at Pind. Pyth. 1.48–50, see Morgan 2015: 326–33.
55 Parsons 1992: 32; West 1993a: 4. So too Obbink 2001: 69–70. Contra Pavese 1995: 14.
56 Cf. Hornblower 2001.
57 Or at least – and what is in fact a rather different thing – not biased in favour of Corinth: Boedeker 2001a: 132 n. 47, Aloni 2001: 101; contra Grethlein 2010: 53.
58 Boedeker 2001a: 127.
59 Aloni 2001: 98, Boedeker 2001b: 158.
60 Boedeker 2001b: 148–60.
61 Pavese 1995: 22.
62 Parsons 1992: 32, Schachter 1998: 29, Shaw 2001: 181. Pavese 1995: 21–4 suggested Leonidas because of the proem’s emphasis on death and because Pausanias’ temperament seemed to him not particularly Achillean.
63 Schachter 1998: 29–30.
64 Schachter 1998: 29.
65 If the line did narrate the return home this makes it difficult to see the poem as a threnodic elegy, since the juxtaposition of the return of the heroes and fame being poured upon them by Homer is quite close. Cf. Sbardella 2000: 6.
66 As commentators have noted, Simonides has broadened the application of this term from Achilles (whom it describes four out of five times in the Iliad) to the hagemachoi Danaoi. Parsons 1992: 31, Lloyd-Jones 1994: 3, Strauss-Clay 2001: 183.
67 Boedeker 2001b: 158.
68 Burzacchini 1995: 30, Pavese 1995: 12. Rawles 2008, rightly troubled by the Doric alpha at the beginning of the word, suggests that Simonides in fact wrote ἀγχέμαχοι, an adjective that has a good Homeric pedigree and that would characterise the Greeks as ‘close-fighting’. This is an elegant solution, but one that reduces the fruitful complexity of the poem.
69 Parsons 1992: 30.
70 Pavese 1995: 16.
71 Parsons 1992: 35.
72 Kowerski 2005: 75–80 argues energetically against a scenario of ambiguity and tension in the wake of the Battle of Plataea, and for an atmosphere of harmony. For the reasons discussed in this paper, I think that the harmony scenario is overdrawn, but it is also worth making the point that tension need not be destructive.
73 Hdt. 4.81.3.
74 Parsons 1992: 36.
75 Schachter 1998: 28–9; cf. Shaw 2001: 173.
76 Hdt. 9.64 νίκην ἀναιρέεται καλλίστην ἁπασέων τῶν ἡμεῖς ἴδμεν Παυσανίης ὁ Κλεομβρότου τοῦ Ἀναξανδρίδεω.
77 The author wishes to thank E. Cingano, A. Purves and M. Telò for fruitful discussions on various aspects of this paper.