The Poet Unleaved Simonides and Callimachus

Abstract Simonides 22 W2 intrigues and tantalizes. Peter Parsons, to whom we owe this combination of POxy 2327 and 3965, 1 tentatively interpreted both the journey described in the wretched tatters of the first verses and the “party“ that occupies the main bulk of the fragment as a fantasy, perhaps of rejuvenation in the next life: “The extreme view would be this: The aged Simonides longs to escape (now, or after death), carrying his poetry, across the sea to the place of many trees, the Island of the Blest (Elysium), there to meet again the dead Echecratidas in all his desirable youth; they will join in the symposium; the wrinkled Simonides too will recover his youth.“2 In a full and careful discussion of the fragment, Sarah Mace argues that the journey was not a post-mortem fantasy, but a utopian one-the aging poet desires to consort with a handsome boy on a make-believe island from where, as in all utopias, old age is banished.3 On her view, the poem is an encomium of a young patron, or a patron’s son, and the utopian eroticism makes it clear that in the real world the poet is not in fact a potential suitor (he is far too old); for such erotic encomium Mace helpfully compares Pindar’s famous verses on the melting beauty of Theoxenos (fr. 123 Maehler). More recently, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis has seen in the fragments a female lament for Echecratidas or his son.4