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them to the toiling masses in crucial documents which just happen to have been preserved for us, may conceivably be applicable to certain cases in mathematics and the sciences (where progress depends upon the acquisition of considerable preliminary knowledge), but seems prima facie most unlikely when the matter at issue is the moral experience available to any adult's inspection. Furthermore, in terms of the external context actually furnished by the evolution of Greek moral thought, there is not a single element in Simonides' poem for which scholars have not found parallels in earlier Greek thought, from Homer to Dracon.40 |
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But the decisive objection to this particular external recontextualization of the ode is that it does not pass the test of point-by-point comparison with the internal context of the ode itself. Thus (i) the opening of the poem nowhere refers to the aristocratic archaic ethos of success and external goods. The words  ("hands and feet and mind," 2) seem intended to emphasize not so much socially acknowledged achievements as rather the individual's own capacities, and they climax, with  , in a decidedly mentalist factor. (ii) The second strophe certainly does not attack archaic morality indeed, it programmatically confirms views on human mutability and dependence upon the gods common in Greek thought at least since the Homeric epics41 but on the other hand it is just as clearly not intended to function as a reductio, provisionally accepting the archaic ethos for the sake of argument only in order to show the absurdities to which it leads. In point of fact, the second strophe is not rejected in what follows but serves as an argumentative basis for the rest of the poem. What is more, it is hard to see what sense to attribute to the alleged claim in line 14 that only a god could be morally virtuous or attain wealth and social prestige. (iii) But the most serious difficulties are raised by the view that the third strophe proposes intentionality as a new basis for moral thought. (a) First, Simonides' formulation is strikingly negative he does not say, "I approve of the man of good will," but rather "I approve of the man who does nothing shameful willingly." (b) Second, his formulation is immediately followed by a prominent concession to a category which is called , "necessity" (29), and is left entirely unspecified. What is this necessity acting under the constraint of which men can commit shameful acts and yet not incur Simonides' censure? If Simonides were really focusing attention upon issues of free will, compulsion, and responsibility, we might expect him to clarify his meaning: but he does not. (c) Third, if intention is the central innovation in the poem, it is odd that in the fourth strophe Simonides no longer mentions it and apparently uses the same term,  (34), which had occurred thrice in the second strophe, in the allegedly |
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40 See particularly Dickie (1978) 2432 and Parry (1965) 3014; also Bowra (1934) 23334 and (1961) 32930, and Christ (1941) 1820. |
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41 See in general Fränkel (1968) 2339. |
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