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generally that the Scopadai were avaricious.59 Perhaps, then, Scopas was not so pleased with Simonides' encomium after all. |
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This is of course only a hypothesis: but it has at least the virtues of accounting for the poem's oddities and of being supported both by parallels from contemporary Greek literature60 and by what we know about Simonides and can guess about Scopas. If it is accepted provisionally as plausible, the result is curious: interpretations of the poem along more or less similar lines dominated throughout the nineteenth century, while the moral reading our century has favored seems never to have occurred to anyone before Wilamowitz. In the nineteenth century, the constitution of the text was still far from secure, but its interpretation had achieved results remarkably similar to those proposed here. There is, however, this important difference: older scholars sought some particular referent, some specific outrage which Scopas had actually committed and to which this poem was covertly alluding (thereby laying themselves open to the objection that Simonides must have been an extremely tactless encomiast if his eulogy was really a concealed accusation), while the present study argues in terms of a more generalized ideological system involving power and discourse, praise and blame. In the nineteenth century most scholars agreed that Scopas must have been unpopular: they were uncertain only about precisely what crime he had committed to become so unpopular.61 It was Wilamowitz's influential article which both finally provided an apparently reliable text for the poem and liquidated the traditional interpretation of it in terms of Scopas' unpopularity as a "groundless assumption," substituting for it the (equally groundless) moral reading in which intention comes to replace archaic morality.62 After Wilamowitz, most scholars went on to print an acceptable text but to burden it with an implausible interpretation, freeing the text of Simonides from the context of the Protagoras, while locking its meaning into the context of Protagoras' and Socrates' discussion of  . |
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Just as the right text does not entail a plausible interpretation, so too a faulty text need not preclude one. Sometimes, the text may be less important than the contexts against which it is set. |
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59 Respectively, (a) Plut. De aud. poet. 15D; (b) Callim. Fr. 68 Pf., Cic. De nat. deor. 2.86. 352, Quintil. Inst. orat. 11.2.12ff.; (c) Plut. Cato mai. 18, De cupid. devit. 527C. Van Groningen (1948) 27 suggests on the basis of the first of these passages that Simonides' Thessalian poems had no myths; but this strange view rests upon a misunderstanding of the term  . |
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60 Most notably Pindar's Second Pythian Ode, on which see Most (1985) 10132. |
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61 E.g., Aars (1888) 13; Apelt (1922) 132 n. 102; Bergk (1882) 3856; Bertram (1885) 55; Flach (1884) 635; Jurenka (1906) 869, 8745; Madvig (1875) 413; Michelangeli (1896) 1011; Müller (1875) 354; Sauppe (1857) xx; Schneidewin (1835) xv, xxviii, and 2122, and (1839) 379; Smyth (1900) 3112; Taylor (1960) 253 and n. 1. |
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62 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1913) 169. |
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