Simonides Quotes

“There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric.

The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement.

He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“When Simonides was discussing wisdom and riches with Hieron's wife, and she asked him which was better, to become wise or to become wealthy, he replied, 'To become wealthy. For I see the wise sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.”
― Aristotle, Rhetoric

“Stranger, go back to Sparta and tell our people
that we who were slain obeyed the code.”
― Simonides

“One thousand years, ten thousand years
are but a tiny dot,
the smallest segment of a point,
an invisible hair.”
― Simonides

“With mindless bravura Ares washed his long sleek arrowheads
in the crimson waters within their chests,
and dust now lies not on the living flesh
of javeliners,
but on the vivid remnants of lifeless bodies.”
― Simonides

“All these victors from the Tyrrhenian wars
we're on their way to Apollo at Delph
with their first plunder
when they found, their grave
on one night, in one ship, in one deep sea.”
― Simonides

“All these victors from the Tyrrhenian wars
were on their way to Apollo at Delphi
with their first plunder
when they found, their grave
on one night, in one ship, in one deep sea.”
― Simonides

“If you are a simple mortal, do not speak
of tomorrow or how long this man may be
among the happy, for change comes suddenly
like the shifting flight of a dragonfly.”
― Simonides

“Without the gods
a man or city can do nothing.
Only God knows everything, and man
suffers for what he does.

There is no evil
man may not expect, and soon
God wipes away the few things
he may have done.”
― Simonides

“I who lie here, Brotachos of Gortyn, was born in Krete,
and I did not come here for death but weighty business.”
― Simonides

“When her fate rested on the razor's edge,
we gave away our lives to save all Greece.”
― Simonides

“A tilting sea and thundering winds
tossed the carved chest and filled Danaë
with terror; she cried
and placed her arm lovingly around
Perseus saying: 'My child, I suffer
and yet your heart is calm; you sleep
profoundly in the blue dark of night
and shine in our gloomy bronze-ribbed boat.
Don't think of the heaving saltwave
that seeps in through airholes and drenches
your hair, nor of the clamoring gale;
but lying in our seaviolet blanket
keep your lovely body close to mine.
If you knew the horror of our plight,
your gentle ears would hear my words.
But sleep, my son, and let
the ocean sleep and our great troubles end.
I ask you, father Zeus,
rescue us from our fate; and should
my words seem too severe, I beg you please
remember where we are, and forgive
my prayer.”
― Simonides

“Be sure, stranger, to let the Spartans know
that we lie here obedient to their command.”
― Simonides

“This is the tomb of the famous Megistias, slain by
the Persians near the Spercheios River,
a seer who even when aware that death was near
would not desert his Spartan kings.”
― Simonides

“Through their extraordinary courage, the wide
farmlands of Tegea
have not shot fire and smoke into the sky.
For they made their choice
to leave their children in a country green
and sweet with freedom,
and died for this in the wild ranks of battle.”
― Simonides

“Against those who are indebted to the allegorical utopian model and its offshoots, the Memory Palace proves that alternatives to the tribal consensus exists. Furthermore, this alternative is a leap away, is deeply discontinuous with the allegorists' endless internal struggles for refinement. It promises not quite freedom but the fact that a careful look at history as achievement rather than ruination offers solid evidence that the allegorical utopian has about it no necessity at all.”
― Paul A. Bové, Love’s Shadow