The New Simonides Toward a Commentary

Abstract The main sources are two papyri from Oxyrhynchus in the Fayyum, both probably to be dated to the second century c.E. These are POxy 2327 and POxy 3965, which overlap with each other in two places. Simonidean authorship is established by two coin cidences with passages of poetry otherwise attributed to Simonides by Plutarch and Stobaeus. The scribe of POxy 2327 is the same as that of POxy 2430, a collection of fragments of the Simonidean paeans and epinicia and perhaps other genres in lyric meters.’ The papyri contained elegiac poems, some apparently military or historical in theme, others sympotic. It looks as if POxy 3965 represents a roll entirely devoted to elegiacs; the roll from which POxy 2327 comes may also have been all elegiacs, but if POxy 2327 is not wholly distinct from POxy 2430, it contained lyric poems as well. In the Hellenistic edition of Simonides, the principle of classification must have been in part by perceived genre, with sections for. threnoi, dithyrambs, encomia, epinicia, and paeans, perhaps kateukhai (537 PMG), and a miscellaneous category of summikta (540 PMG).2 The arrangement might have been one genre per book-roll, though that would depend on the number of poems assigned to each genre.3 Suda also says that there were epigrams, perhaps the so-called Sylloge Simonidea.4 How the elegiac poems were arranged is unclear.Suda refers only to titles—the Xerxou Naumachia and the Ep’ Artemisioi Naumachia. These and other poems might have been long enough to fill a whole book-roll on their own, but it seems more likely that they were at most a couple of hundred lines long, and that they were grouped in a book, or books, of elegies. Perhaps there were separate book-rolls for, say, historical and sym- potic elegies. The epigrams, if they were included, perhaps formed a short appendix of a few hundred lines at the end of one of the books of elegies.5 The arrangement in the edition(s) represented in the papyri does not necessarily correspond to the arrangement in the Hellenistic edition, since a large papyrus, with tall columns of forty lines, might have absorbed several Hellenistic books. One such large roll perhaps contained longer elegiac fragments, one contained lyrics.