Simonides of Ceos - Ethics

Ethics

Simonides championed a tolerant, humanistic outlook that celebrated ordinary goodness, and recognized the immense pressures that life places on human beings. His rival, Pindar, who identified closely with the aristocratic world and its heroic ethic, never composed anything as thoughtful or sympathetic as the following poem of Simonides (fr. 542), quoted in Plato's dialogue, the Protagoras, and reconstructed here according to a recent interpretation, making it the only lyric poem of Simonides that survives intact:

For a man it’s certainly hard to be truly good—perfect in hands, feet, and mind, built without a single flaw; only a god could have that prize; but a mere man, there’s just no way he can help being bad when some overwhelming disaster knocks him down. Any man’s good when life treats him well, and bad when it treats him badly, and the best of us are the ones the gods love most.

But for me that saying of Pittacus doesn’t ring true either (even if he was a smart man): he says “being good is hard.” For me, a man's good enough as long as he's not lawless, and if he has the common sense of right and wrong that does a city good—a decent guy. I certainly won’t find fault with a man like that. After all, there’s an endless supply of stupid fools. The way I see it, if there’s no great shame in it, it's all right.

So I’m not going to throw away my short allotment of life on a futile, silly hope, searching for something there simply cannot be, a completely blameless man—not among us mortals who must win our bread from the broad earth. (Of course, If I do happen to come across one, I’ll be sure to let you know.) So long as he doesn't willfully do wrong, I give my praise and love to any man. But not even the gods can resist necessity.