Simonides’ Lament

To see with Agamemnon’s eyes, consider listening to Simonides’ lament: 

You are a human, therefore seek not
to foretell what tomorrow may bring,
nor how long one’s happiness may last.
For not even the flutter of the fly’s wings
is as fast as the changing of fortunes.

                                                                     – Simonides, Threnos

Francis Yates begins her Art of Memory
with an account of Simonides, a Greek poet
commisioned by a powerful nobleman, Scopas,
to compose and recite a song of praise. When Simonides praised not only Scopas, but also the divine heroes
Castor and Pollux, Scopas appreciation included
only half the agreed-upon fee. Scopas instructed Simonides to collect the other half from Castor and Pollux. Receiving a message that two travellers wished to speak
to him outside, Simonides, looking in vain for the messengers, felt the ground roll as an earthquake
brought down the palace of Scopas, burying all within.
His absent visitors, apparently Castor and Pollux,
had rewarded him by removing him from the disaster.

Relatives could not identify bodies for burial. But Simonides, trained to present credible and moving stories by attention to the circumstances in which characters act, recalled the arrangement of Scopas and his guests, enabling him to identify the remains.

Orderly arrangement is necessary for effective speaking,
and orderly arrangement is a precondition for attentive listening.

. . . persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.

The credibility of Homeric stories depends on their power to bring back to life the circumstances in which past actions develop. Modern readers no doubt will consider good or bad the choices Homeric Greeks made. For such consideration to work, however, attention to specific circumstances in which Greeks lived and died can bring listeners closer to the Greek audiences originally attending Homer’s recitations. For the Greeks, what a story means follows what a story does.  A meaningful story, however clear, has no value for an unmoved audience. What, then, moves Homer’s audience? The convincing theatre in which men think, feel and act. Consider a Greek audience for Simonides’ threnos.