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their sexual promiscuity and Xenophon for offering them. But Pindar's appeal to the necessity of religious obligations, admitted by everyone, not only exculpates them all but even makes the whole rather odd situation fine and praiseworthy. Indeed, Pindar's phrase  is so similar verbally to Simonides' words  that it is worth wondering whether Pindar might be consciously echoing Simonides' ode, or, perhaps more likely, whether both might be drawing independently upon some popular proverb.50 |
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This much can be derived from a close examination of the internal context of the poem. But the result has at least two odd features. The first is the marked emphasis, from beginning to end, upon the impossibility of finding anyone at all who cannot be blamed for at least something. The second is the curious transformation of what had traditionally been a minimal condition into a maximal one, the awarding of highest praise not to the man who performs heroic exploits but rather to the one who commits no shameful deed except under the compulsion of necessity. What kind of external context can be hypothesized to account for these peculiarities? We have seen that an external contextualization in terms of the development of Greek moral thought is unconvincing. Perhaps a more concretely historical one in terms of the poem's original situation of performance might prove more productive. About Simonides we know that he was a professional poet of praise, hired to compose encomiastic poetry in various genres at the expense, and in honor, of patrons who were certainly distinguished by power and wealth but not necessarily by a high ethical standard.51 As Socrates himself puts it in the course of his discussion of this poem in the Protagoras, "And often, I suppose, Simonides thought that he too had praised and eulogized some tyrant or some other such person, not of his own free will but under constraint" (346B).52 About Scopas we know that Phainias, a Peripatetic who wrote a historical work entitled  ("The Murder of Tyrants for Revenge"), included him in this work and described him as a heavy drinker.53 To be sure, Phainias was writing about two centuries after Scopas and we should be wary of jumping to the conclusion, on the sole basis of his testimony, that Scopas was a brutal |
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50 Vernant (1979) places the phrase in a wider context, perhaps too much so. |
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51 On Simonides and praise poetry for hire, see especially Detienne (1964) and Svenbro (1984) 12545. |
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52  (346B). The facts that Socrates uses the observation to support a quite implausible interpretation of the word in Simonides and that he deliberately speaks vaguely and generally about tyrants rather than specifically about Scopas does not in the least lessen the importance of this neglected passage for the interpretation of this poem. |
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53 Athen. Deipn. 10.438C = Phain. Frag. 14 Wehrli. Already Aristotle collected examples of tyrants who fell  (Pol. 5.10.1311a25ff.). |
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