The lyric poet Simonides of Ceos, an Athenian Greek,  is celebrated for his solemn style and rich imagery and for his victory odes (“epinicia”), dirges, elegies, and epigrams (especially those honoring the Greeks who died at the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae).

Simonides had returned to Athens after the Battle of Marathon, but soon left for Sicily at the invitation of Hiero of Syracuse, at whose court he will spend the rest of his life.

So unbounded is his popularity that he is a power even in the political world; we are told that he reconciled Hiero and Theron on the eve of a battle between their opposing armies.

He is the intimate friend of Themistocles and Pausanias the Spartan, and his poems on the war of liberation against Persia no doubt give a powerful impulse to the national patriotism.

He has passed much of his time with aristocrats, for whom he has written various kinds of commemorative poetry, little of which survives.

According to Plutarch, Simonides once said "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks."

For his poems he can command almost any price: later writers, from Aristophanes onward, will accuse him of avarice, probably not without some reason.

To Hiero's queen, who had asked him whether it was better to be born rich or a genius, he replied "Rich, for genius is ever found at the gates of the rich."

Again, when someone asked him to write a laudatory poem for which he offered profuse thanks, but no money, Simonides replied that he kept two coffers, one for thanks, the other for money; that, when he opened them, he found the former empty and useless, and the latter full.

He dies in 468.