Quotessence
Home / Topics / Simonides Quotes

Simonides Quotes

Browse 16 quotes about Simonides.

Simonides Quotes

“A tilting sea and thundering winds tossed the carved chest and filled Danaë with terror; she cried and placed her arm lovingly around Perseus saying: 'My child, I suffer and yet your heart is calm; you sleep profoundly in the blue dark of night and shine in our gloomy bronze-ribbed boat. Don't think of the heaving saltwave that seeps in through airholes and drenches your hair, nor of the clamoring gale; but lying in our seaviolet blanket keep your lovely body close to mine. If you knew the horror of our plight, your gentle ears would hear my words. But sleep, my son, and let the ocean sleep and our great troubles end. I ask you, father Zeus, rescue us from our fate; and should my words seem too severe, I beg you please remember where we are, and forgive my prayer.”

“There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric. The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement. He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.”

“Against those who are indebted to the allegorical utopian model and its offshoots, the Memory Palace proves that alternatives to the tribal consensus exists. Furthermore, this alternative is a leap away, is deeply discontinuous with the allegorists' endless internal struggles for refinement. It promises not quite freedom but the fact that a careful look at history as achievement rather than ruination offers solid evidence that the allegorical utopian has about it no necessity at all.”