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encomium of Scopas. But therein lies a difficulty. For in effect Simonides was trying to use one and the same poem to convey two rather different messages to two quite different audiences: on the one hand to Scopas, whose commission he had accepted and who could expect to be praised extravagantly; and on the other hand to professional colleagues and a pan-Hellenic audience (including other potential patrons), who might well blame him for praising Scopas. He must balance his poem upon a razor's edge of tact if it is not to fall into one or the other of opposite kinds of failure. Scopas certainly was  in the sense of enjoying considerable wealth and power, but he is not very likely to have been  in the sense of being a paragon of moral virtue. Simonides must deploy a systematic ambiguity between the two meanings of this term and of others if he is to hope to satisfy both kinds of audiences. |
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Sufficient proof that his text ultimately succeeds in avoiding the symmetrical pitfalls of an unambiguous declaration of allegiance to the one set of meanings (success) or to the other (virtue) is provided by the perplexity of generations of classical scholars who have tried in vain to pin it down. But can we be sure that Simonides achieved success with both of his contemporary audiences? With regard to his non-Thessalian readership, the fact that his poem became famous in Greece is indicated by Protagoras' choice of it for his controversy with Socrates and by the familiarity with which they both discuss it from memory.57 But what of Simonides' patron? Might not Scopas have deemed the encomium half-hearted, or suspected his poet of praising him with faint damns?58 We cannot be sure. For if, on the one hand, Scopas and his court were indeed sophisticated and enlightened, an encomium like this may not have been offensive. Many Greeks thought it better to be envied than pitied, and a ruler, if he wished, could choose to read Simonides' poem as a hymn both to the magnitude of his power and to the enlightened use to which he puts it. After all, Simonides asserts that only a god could achieve greater success than a man like Scopas has, and he supports this assertion by an appeal to many of the most traditional elements of Greek popular morality. On the other hand, numerous testimonia report that Simonides said he could not fool the Thessalians because they were too stupid, or that Scopas refused to pay money he owed Simonides for a different poem he had commissioned but was dissatisfied with, or more |
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57 See especially 339B. |
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58 So e.g. Flach (1884) 635 ("Man mub gestehn, dass niemals ein Fürst in vorsichtigerer Weise in Schutz genommen ist und in beschränkterer Weise Lob erhalten hat") and Gundert (1952) 86. |
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