This edition and commentary covers, for the most part, those poems by Simonides written in elegiac distichs now called epigrams and elegies. Each poem and fragment is accompanied by a detailed commentary and translation, where applicable, while a comprehensive general Introduction sets Simonides and his works into their historical context.

Over the course of his life (550-460 BC), the Greek poet Simonides produced poetic work of every kind then extant. Unfortunately, Simonides' corpus has survived only in fragments, though classical scholars have been studying his work for generations. The 1992 discovery of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri revolutionized the study of Simonides, casting particular light on the epic of Plataea. This edited volume gathers the best of the recent research on Simonides' newly expanded oeuvre into a single collection that will be an important reference for scholars of Greek poetry.

Simonides of Keos was one of the most important praise-poets of the early fifth century BCE, ranking alongside Pindar and Bacchylides. In Simonides Lyricus, a group of leading international experts revisit familiar questions about his lyric poetry, and pose new ones. Themes discussed include textual criticism and attribution of fragments; poetic genre and the place of the poet’s melic fragments in his larger oeuvre; the historical, cultural and political background of the poems; and Simonides’ afterlife in the biographical and anecdotal traditions that formed around his name. The volume makes a substantial contribution to modern discussions of Simonides’ place in Greek literary and cultural history and to the understanding of this poet’s often fragmentary and difficult texts.

Anacreon is one of the most important of the Greek archaic lyric poets and has enjoyed a rich reception in both ancient and modern Europe, from Horace in Rome to the so-called Anacreontic poets in modern Europe (among them Abraham Cowley and Robert Herrick in England, and the young Goethe in Germany). However, despite his importance within the classical canon, there has been no full-scale commentary on the fragments of Anacreon in recent decades (with the exception of a single commentary in modern Greek). The two volumes seek to address this gap in scholarship by providing a detailed and up-to-date commentary on all the known fragments of Anacreon alongside a freshly edited text, critical apparatus, and a new translation. The commentary to reconstruct the context of the fragments, shedding light on Anacreon's relation to earlier poets and discussing a variety of aspects of his work, including language, style, narratological analysis, intertextuality, and performance. Close attention has been paid to Anacreon's elaborate poetic language and use of imagery, especially in the representation of paradoxical emotions: the analysis systematically applies the refined tools developed in recent studies on the language of archaic poetry in order to describe and explain these phenomena, while recent findings in the history of religion and classical archaeology have been brought to bear on his representation of the gods. Fresh interpretation of the papyrus fragments has been particularly fruitful as new material has come to light and fundamentally changed our perception of Anacreon: these show that besides familiar topics such as love, the symposium, and observations of everyday life, more unexpected themes such as the Demeter-cult numbered among his concerns and played a significant role in his poetry.

For over two centuries, iambus and elegy attracted some of the finest poetic talents in Greek history and played a major role in public and private life, surviving as living forms into the fourth century BC. This edited collection provides the first comprehensive exploration devoted specifically to iambus and elegy, offering an important insight into the key issues within current research on the genres. Chapters by leading international scholars in the fieldexamine the forms from a broad range of perspectives and provide a solid foundation for future research.

Simonides is tantalising and enigmatic, known both from fragments and from an extensive tradition of anecdotes. This monograph, the first in English for a generation, employs a two-part diachronic approach: Richard Rawles first reads Simonidean fragments with attention to their intertextual relationship with earlier works and traditions, and then explores Simonides through his ancient reception. In the first part, interactions between Simonides' own poems and earlier traditions, both epic and lyric, are studied in his melic fragments and then in his elegies. The second part focuses on an important strand in Simonides' ancient reception, concerning his supposed meanness and interest in remuneration. This is examined in Pindar's Isthmian 2, and then in Simonides' reception up to the Hellenistic period. The book concludes with a full re-interpretation of Theocritus 16, a poem which engages both with Simonides' poems and with traditions about his life.