During his youth he taught
poetry and
music, and composed
paeans for the festivals of
Apollo. Finding little scope for his abilities at home, he went to live at
Athens, at the court of
Hipparchus, the patron of
literature. After the murder of Hipparchus (514 BC), Simonides withdrew to
Thessaly, where he enjoyed the protection and patronage of the Scopadae and Aleuadae (two celebrated Thessalian families).
Cicero (
De oratore, ii. 86) tells the story of the end of his relations with the Scopadae. His patron, Scopas, reproached him at a banquet for devoting too much space to a praise of
Castor and
Pollux in an ode celebrating Scopas' victory in a
chariot-race. Scopas refused to pay all the fee and told Simonides to apply to the twin gods for the remainder. Shortly afterwards, Simonides was told that two young men wished to speak to him; after he had left the banqueting room, the roof fell in and crushed Scopas and his guests.
http://www.bartleby.com/181/253.html During the excavation of the rubble, Simonides was called upon to identify each guest killed. He managed to do so by correlating their identities to their positions (loci) at the table before his departure. After thanking Castor and Pollux for paying their half of the fee by saving his life, Simonides drew on this experience to develop the 'memory theatre' or
'memory palace', a system for information management widely used in
oral societies until the
Renaissance. He is often credited with inventing this ancient system of
mnemonics (
Quintilian xi.2,n).
After the
Battle of Marathon, Simonides returned to Athens, but soon left for
Sicily at the invitation of
Hiero I of Syracuse, at whose
court he spent the rest of his life.
His reputation as a man of learning is shown by the tradition that he introduced the distinction between the long and short vowels (ε, η, ο, ω), afterwards adopted in the Ionic alphabet that came into general use during the
archonship of Eucleides (403 BCE).
So unbounded was his popularity that he was a power even in the
political world; we are told that he reconciled Hiero and Thero on the eve of a battle between their opposing armies. He was the intimate friend of
Themistocles and
Pausanias the
Spartan, and his poems on the
war of liberation against Persia no doubt gave a powerful impulse to the
national patriotism.
For his poems he could command almost any price: later writers, from
Aristophanes onwards, accuse him of
avarice, probably not without some reason. To Hiero's queen, who asked him whether it was better to be born rich or a
genius, he replied "Rich, for genius is ever found at the gates of the rich." Again, when someone asked him to write a laudatory poem for which he offered profuse thanks, but no money, Simonides replied that he kept two coffers, one for thanks, the other for money; that, when he opened them, he found the former empty and useless, and the latter full.
