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Simonides was a famous lyric poet from the city of Iulis, in the island of Ceos, off the coast of Attica. He left his native island in his youth and went to Athens, where he spent the largest part of his life. He probably also spent some time at the court of Hieron, the tyrant of Syracuse, where he may have met with Pindar. He was probably the first to write victory odes for winners at the Olympic games, a genre in which Pindar would later become most famous. He wrote an epitaph for the Spartans dead at the Thermopylæ with Leonidas (see Herodotus' Histories, , VII, 228) that was most famous in antiquity. Little is left of his works, of which only fragments are extant.
Simonides is the author of the poem commented by Socrates in the Protagoras (Protagoras, 339a-347a) and of the definition of justice suggested by Cephalus and taken over by Polemarchus at the beginning of the Republic (Republic, I, 331d, sq).