Everything about Semonides totally explained
Semonides (or
Semontoes)
of Amorgos was an
ancient Greek iambic poet who flourished in the middle of the
7th century BC. He was a native of
Samos, and derived his surname from having founded a colony in the neighbouring island of
Amorgos.
According to the
Suda, besides two books of iambics, he wrote elegies, one of them a poem on the early history of the
Samians. The elegy included in the fragments (85) of
Simonides of Ceos is more probably by Semonides of Amorgos. We possess about thirty fragments of his iambic poems, written in clear and vigorous
Ionic, with much force and no little harmony of versification.
With Semonides, as with
Archilochus, the iambic is still the vehicle of bitter satire, interchanging with melancholy, but in Semonides the satire is rather general than individual. His "Pedigree of Women" may have been suggested by the beast fable, as we find it in
Hesiod and Archilochus, and as it recurs a century later in
Phocylides; it's clear at least that Semonides knew the works of the former. Semonides derives the dirty woman from a hog, the cunning from a fox, the fussy from a dog, the apathetic from earth, the capricious from sea-water, the stubborn from an ass, the incontinent from a weasel, the proud from a high-bred mare, the worst and ugliest from an ape, and the good woman from a bee. The remainder of the poem (96-118) is undoubtedly spurious. There is much beauty and feeling in Simonides's description of the good woman.
See Fragments in
T Bergk,
Poetae lyrici Graeci; separate editions by
FG Welcker (1835), and especially by P Malusa (1900), with exhaustive introduction, bibliography and commentary.
Sources
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