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man should be praised or blamed.46 Substituting, in the interpretation of the poem, "praiseworthy" for words like "good" and "blameworthy" for words like "bad'' makes the contradictions and confusions which arose from the substantivization of its moral vocabulary simply vanish. (i) Simonides begins by declaring in the first strophe that it is hard to find someone who cannot be blamed in any regard whatsoever: he adopts Pittacus' maxim, but transforms it not only by reinforcing it but also by specifying climactically that it involves freedom from blame ( , "without reproach" 3).47 (ii) In the second strophe he goes on to say that to be fully free of blame is impossible for a human and possible only for a god, since among men praise and blame are dependent upon success and failure, and these in turn are in the lap of the gods. Those humans are praised most whom the gods love as Theognis puts it in a striking parallel,  "Whom the gods honor, even the fault-finder praises."48 (iii) "Therefore," Simonides continues in the third and fourth strophes, "I shall not waste my time looking for a man whom no one blames, for none such could possibly exist; instead, I for my part shall praise whoever does not commit a shameful deed of his own free will (of course, if he does so under the compulsion of necessity, that is another matter), whoever is not blameworthy nor excessively violent and who respects the laws of his city for the number of people who deserve censure as not even satisfying these criteria is infinite. In short, I shall praise whatever is free of shameful elements." |
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For this line of thought, which prohibits the eventuality of censure by appeal to the power of necessity and goes so far as to term the result not merely acceptable but even  ("fair"), a fragment of Pindar offers a remarkably close parallel. Xenophon of Corinth had promised to devote a hundred temple prostitutes to the cult of Aphrodite if he received the goddess' favor; now, having gained his wish, he fulfils his vow and commissions Pindar to compose a poem for this peculiar occasion. In the surviving fragment, Pindar writes, "To you, maidens, he made it possible without criticism ( ) to pluck the fruit of soft youth on lovely beds; for under necessity all is fine( ) ."49 We might well imagine that some people would want to blame the girls for |
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46 Crotty (1982) 39 and now Carson (1992) 120 argue along generally similar lines. |
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47 That the first strophe went on to name Scopas explicitly is rendered virtually certain by generic considerations and by the fact that Protagoras and Socrates know that the poem was addressed to him; see Aars (1888) 9 and Blass (1872) 329. But what else this first strophe contained we can only guess. Perhaps Simonides went on, after beginning "It is hard to find someone who cannot be blamed in any regard whatsoever," to add, "And you, Scopas, with your full experience of the world know this very well" (so Christ [1941] 15) or even "And so even you, Scopas, have been criticized by a few people." |
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48 Theognis 169. |
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49 Pindar Frag. 122 Snell-Maehler. |
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