"The Praise Singer"

[fiefoe]

The middle of the book finds Simonides prospering in Athens, though we are already told that, 'When the fruit is sweetest, it falls. One can't tell the day'.

This is a stately book. The best characters conduct themselves with unforced dignity. The vignette of Anakreon lamenting the murder of the Samian pirate king Polykrates is punctuated with the soft squeaks of his faithful Blossom, a bitch in heat. ("About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;").  It's also charming to read about how the red-figure pottery first came into fashion because Hipparchos was a curious man.   

• ... steep islands, still and dark in a laughing sea; white harbors full of strange ships; a road creeping small into dark blue mountains;...
• There is praise ... which makes one wonder what one did wrong, to have caught the fancy of such a fool.
• (A song has) painted the walls of my memory.
• There is a certain threshold between a courtier and a sycophant; nobody tells one when one crosses it, but one feels it in oneself.