Heroic Historiography Simonides and Herodotus on Plataea

Abstract POxy 3965 offers a tantalizing glimpse of a kind of poetry virtually unknown to us before: encomiastic narrative elegy that celebrates contemporary historical events. In revealing this genre, Simonides’ “Plataea elegy” raises new questions about the relationships among epic, elegy, and historiography in the fifth century. In this poem, the heroic, epic past-including the death of Achilles and sack of Troy-evidently provides a paradigm for recent events.1 So, too, the poet who conferred undying kleos upon the Greeks at Troy serves as a model (or rival) for the present poet, who aspires to glorify the participants in the battle just fought (fr. 11.15-28). Full of surprises as it is, Simonides’ elegy has close connections to several familiar genres. Epic poetry obviously provides an important point of reference, helping to define both what the poem is and what it is not (cf. West 1993a; Clay, Aloni, and Stehle in this volume). So too does hymnic poetry (Obbink, this volume), epinician with its analogies between the contemporary athlete and heroic predecessors (cf. Harrison, this volume, and Aloni at n. 32), and earlier historical elegies. Texts such as the Plataea poem belong to those crowd-pleasing accounts of the past—including epic poetry, public funeral speeches, and Herodotus’ Histories— that Thucydides rejects in favor of a non-mythodic KTfjpta e$ aiei (1.21-22).2