C6/5 BC. See generally P.J. Parsons in OCD4 pp.1368-69.
See also sigma 440 and sigma 441 for the many stories and legends surrounding Simonides' life; and the Bibliography below for the interest in the poet stirred in 1992 by the publication of a papyrus roll (P.Oxy. 3965), on which new fragments such as the Plataea Elegy have been recovered and joined with hitherto anonymous fragments on P.Oxy. 2327.
[1] This name (cf. sigma 442) is perhaps derived from the root for honey, meli-, but with an unexplained second part.
[2] The traditional translation (see LSJ) for the art of memorizing, to\ mnhmoneutiko/n. The Parian Marble states that Simonides invented this art (Marmor Parium 70). He gave his name to later attempts to provide an art of mnemonics, e.g. Adamus Bruxius, Simonides redivivus, sive Ars memoriae et oblivionis (quam hodie complures penitus ignorari scripserunt) tabulis expressa, 1610.
[3] These are the alphabetic letters referred to in Callimachus, Aetia fr. 64 (on the desecration of his tomb, see sigma 441) as perissa/ 'extra, superfluous'. The words used in this entry are confusing, for stoixei=a, 'elements', is more usually used of spoken phonemes and distinguished from written letters, gra/mmata. Here we should, however, accept it as 'alphabetic letters', among which the vowels eta and omega are called 'longs' and the consonants zeta, xi and psi 'doubles' (Dionysius Thrax 1.1.10,14,17; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De compositione verborum 14; Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos 103,113).
[4] i.e. born either 556-3 or 532-29, died 468-5. See Molyneux (below) for a discussion (and a certain hesitation over the date for his death).
[5] This troubling series of phrases has come under intense scrutiny since the publication of fragments of his poems on the Persian Wars in 1992. To interpret and correct this passage we must rely on a scholion to Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 1.211-5, referring to the Naumachia ('Naval Battle') of Simonides. Rutherford (170-1) has suggested that this was a single poem of mixed genre (elegy on Artemisium, ode on Salamis). There are several ways of amending the passage to arrive at this sense, most simply by removing the former of two uses of 'naval battle', naumaxi/a. Alternatively, the phrase "naval battle of Xerxes" might be taken for the title of the whole, misplaced in the syntax. We are thus left with a poem consisting of three parts: (a) a catalog of the peoples of the Persian kingdom, followed by (b) an elegy on the failure of the Greek fleet to defeat the Persian fleet at Artemisium and (c) a victory ode on the battle of Salamis. Such a poem would neatly balance the elegy on the land-battle of Plataea and would bear marked similarities to the Persians of Aeschylus. For a treatment of the elegies of Simonides recovered on the papyrus, see West, The New Simonides and the articles from ZPE in the Bibliography.
[6] Simonides also composed in other genres, most notably epinicia (victory odes for the various Games) and 'symmikta' (perhaps referring to works in mixed genres such as the Naumachia appears to be).
[7] See generally alpha 3420.
[8] Alpha 2245 repeats this citation for the verb of 'storing away.'
[9] This "him", also the subject of the following relative clause, reads as Apollonius, but it is unlikely that he was the composer of the hymn. That composer was probably Simonides, who harps on similar themes, e.g. fr.531 Page: "Neither rust nor all-mastering time will dim such a memorial" (cf. Sider 275-6). One must then take "by him" to mean "by Simonides", which would require tou/twi instead of autwi=, although the confusion is more likely to arise from the omission of words. There is an evident allusion to this hymn at John Chrysostom, De beato Philogonio 48.750.
[10] Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 1.14.