Simonides was the intimate friend of Miltiades and Themistocles
at Athens, of Pausanias at Sparta, and of the tyrants of Sicily.
In the first named city he composed his epigrams on Marathon,
Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea--"poems not destined to be merely
sung or consigned to parchment, but to be carved in marble or
engraved in letters of imperishable bronze upon the works of
the noblest architects and statuaries." In his elegy upon Marathon
he carried away the prize from AEschylus. He was a most prolific
poet, and his writings, comprising all the subjects that human
life, with its joys and sorrows, its hopes and disappointments,
could furnish, are noted for their sweetness and pure and exquisite
polish. He particularly excelled in the pathetic; and the most
celebrated of the existing fragments of his muse, the "Lamentation
of Dan'a-e," is a piece of this character. The poem is based
upon a tradition concerning Danae, the daughter of Acris'ius,
King of Argos, and her infant son, the offspring of Jove.
Acrisius had been told by the oracle that his life would be taken
by a son that his daughter should bear, and, for his own
preservation, when the boy had reached the age of four years,
Acrisius threw both him and his mother into a chest and set them
adrift on the sea. But they were rescued by Dictys, a fisherman
of the Island of Seri'phus, whose brother Polydec'tes, king of
the country, received and protected them. The boy grew up to
manhood, and became the famous hero Per'seus, who accidentally
killed Acrisius at the funeral games of Polydectes. The following
is the

Lamentation of Dan'a-e.

While, around her lone ark sweeping,