He wrote the epitaph for the Spartans who died at Thermopylae - and if later ages remember any ancient Greek lyric poet for the power to make you feel loss, it's him.
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In their own words 4
[Word-for-word translation]O stranger, announce to the Lacadaemonians [Spartans] that hereWe lie, to their words [or laws] obedient.
Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Here lies Megistias, who diedWhen the Medes crossed Spercheius' tide. A great seer, yet he scorned to saveHimself, and shared the Spartans' grave.
Epitaph of the Spartan Diviner, Megistias, at Thermopylae
Anankei d' oude theoi makhontai.
Not even the gods fight against necessity.
In their orbit 1
Writers born in the 560s BC 4
About this person
Born around 556 BC on the island of Ceos, Simonides became one of the nine canonical lyric poets in the Greek tradition, more entangled with the personalities and crises of his era than his contemporaries Pindar and his own nephew Bacchylides. He pioneered new approaches to lyric form that both rivals borrowed, but his real gift was simpler: an ability to distill human grief and basic emotion into language that hit plainly and stuck. The Enlightenment called him "the Greek Voltaire"; the ancients spun tall tales around him - miser, mnemonic genius, alphabet inventor. What survived those myths, though scattered now across papyrus scraps and quotations, is the spare force Quintilian named: a talent for pity unmatched in the genre. He died around 468 BC, and they kept digging up his words in Egyptian sand two thousand years later.
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