The New Simonides

Over the course of his life (550-460 BC), the Greek poet Simonides produced poetic work of every kind then extant: elegies, threnodies, choral odes, countless epigrams, even a small epic. Unfortunately, Simonides' corpus has survived only in fragments, though classical scholars have been studying his work for generations. In 1992, a new fragment of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri was discovered to contain a substantial and previously undiscovered chunk of Simonides' work, and this fragment enabled papyrologists to attribute an earlier unearthed fragment to Simonides as well. Together, the two fragments revolutionized the study of Simondies, casting particular light on the epic of Plataea. Boedecker and Sider's edited volume gathers the best of the recent research on Simonides' newly expanded oeuvre into a single collection which will be an important reference for scholars of Greek poetry.