THOSE who survived were plundered by robbers, who stripped their helpless victims naked and took what little they had managed to save from the wreck. As it happened, the ancient city of Clazomenae lay nearby,* and the wretched mariners sought it out. Here a man devoted to the study of literature, who had often read Simonides’s verses and greatly admired him, even though he had never actually met him, recognised him by his tricks of speech and welcomed him with the greatest of pleasure into his home. Simonides was supplied with clothes, money and attendants; the others, meanwhile, carried pictures of their shipwreck about the streets, begging for scraps.*
Simonides happened to bump into them. “I told you that I had everything of mine with me” he said. “Whatever you tried to carry off you lost.”*
* Clazomenae or Klazomenai was an ancient city in Ionia, a region of western Anatolia near Smyrna (Smyrna is now Izmir in Turkey). The ruins of the town are to be found today in Urla (Vourlá in Greek).
* Shipwrecked mariners would paint an image of their unhappy experience onto a board, and hope to stir passers-by to pity with it. Juvenal, reflecting in Satire XIV on who the madmen of this world were, bade us look at the seafaring merchant. “Poor wretch! on this very night perchance he will be cast out amid broken timbers and engulfed by the waves, clutching his purse with his left hand or his teeth. The man for whose desires yesterday not all the gold which [the River] Tagus and the ruddy Pactolus rolls along would have sufficed, must now content himself with a rag to cover his cold and nakedness, and a poor morsel of food, while he begs for pennies as a shipwrecked mariner, and supports himself by a painted storm!”
* Simonides evidently regarded his wardrobe and the roof over his head as payment for his songwriting, not as pity for wretchedness: dependency was a status he found uncomfortable. “When Simonides was asked why at his advanced age he was so careful of his money,” recorded John of Stobi (fl. 5th century AD), “he replied, ‘It is because I should rather leave money for enemies when I die than stand in need of friends while I live; for I know too well how few friendships last.’”