Simonides (556–469 BCE) was born on the Greek island of Ceos and appears to have worked in the Athenian court of the tyrant Hipparchus as a paid professional poet, a role Simonides is credited with inventing. Widely celebrated by ancient and modern critics for the quality and range of his work, Simonides wrote in many forms, including lament, elegy, and epigram. Several pieces (including the three translated here) survive intact, although only a small portion of the considerable output attributed to Simonides remains. The recent discovery of a papyrus containing substantial portions of a long, previously unknown poem by Simonides—an epic elegy on the battle of Plataea—gives an illuminating new example of the poet’s treatment of events in the Persian Wars, which he often commemorated on commission. The discovery of this papyrus has quadrupled the available Simonidean corpus.

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Kelli Boyles is a poet and a translator of French and ancient Greek literary texts. She is the recipient of a Mellon Fellowship for graduate study in the humanities, the Columbia University Humphrey Award in Creative Writing, and the Academy of American Poets’s Charles Wood and Fanny Fay Poetry Prize. In 2009 she was selected by Maxine Kumin for the National Poetry Prize of the Massachusetts Cultural Center at Cape Cod and shortlisted for the Ann Stanford, Bridport, and Fineline Awards. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in the Bridport Anthology, AGNI, eXchanges, and Mid-American Review, where two of her prose poems appear as Editors’ Choice selections in the new spring issue. (updated 4/2010)