543

Fragment 543 survives only as a partial quotation by an ancient historian. In it, Simonides describes with clarity and pathos the plight of the mythological Danaë, put to sea in a chest with Perseus, her infant son. A series of antithetical images juxtaposes howling wind, raging sea, black night, and Danaë's suffering with the peaceful slumber and calm, bright face of her son. The poem, truncated by its fragmentation, ends with Danaë's wrenching plea to Zeus, her son's real father.

Simonides' Greek is a rich language. A single word can contain a multitude of subtleties one struggles not to lose in translation. For instance, in one line the poet employs an adjective and noun that both mean "dark": kuaneō dnophō might be literally (if clumsily) translated as "the dark darkness." Yet it seems the Greek kuaneos—used in other cases to describe the "glossy-blue" of a bird's wing or a porpoise's skin, the deep sea, or the bottom of the feared whirlpool Charybdis—can involve the definition of a surface or a depth by the presence, or the swallowing, of light. Simonides' night is more than night; it is a consuming "deepdusk darkness."

As with much Greek lyric poetry, the fragmentation of the piece also poses a problem. Some of the extant text is disputed. Still, the poem derives a curious power from its damage: as readers are abruptly hurled into and then torn, mid-line, from the poem's vivid play of tumult and stillness, harshness and tenderness, we undergo an experience that mimics the chaotic uncertainty of storm-tossed Danaë.