And up to the rich country of the far-away Hyperboreans,
with whom once ago banqueted hero king Perseus.
And there where the Massagetai, riders of swift horses,
dwell confident in their quick-shooting bows.
And I came to the divine stream of ever-flowing
Kampasos, that carries water to the immortal godly sea.
And from there I reached, fortified with pale green olive trees,
islands overhung with high-topped reeds.
And I saw the countless race of the half-dog men,
on whose well-formed shoulders a dog’s head
has grown, fortified with tenacious jaws.
And their barking is like that of dogs, yet they are not
ignorant of the famous speech of other mortals.
Author: Simias of Rhodes
Title of Work: Apollo
Location in Work: 7.687-699 (Leone)
Date of Work: c. 300 BCE
Original Language: Greek (Ionic)
Original Text:
τηλυγέτων δ’ ἀφνειὸν ‘Υπερβορέων ἀνὰ δῆμον,
τοῖς δὴ καί ποτ’ ἄναξ ἥρως παρεδαίσατο Περσεύς·
ἔνθα δὲ Μασσαγέται θοῶν ἐπιβήτορες ἵππων
ναίουσι τόξοισι πεποιθότες ὠκυβόλοισι·
θεσπέσιόν τε περὶ ῥόον ἤλυθον ἀεν[άοιο]
Καμπάσου, ὅς ἅλα δῖαν ἐς ἀθάνατην φέρει ὕδωρ.
ἐκ δ’ ἱκόμην ἐλαίαισι περιχλωρῇσιν ἐρυμνὰς
νήσους ὑψικόμοισιν ἐπηρεφέας δονάκεσσιν.
ἠμικύνων τ’ ἐνόησα γένος περιώσιον ἀνδρῶν,
τῶν ὤμων ἐφύπερθεν ἐϋστρεφέων κύνεον κράς
τέτραφε γαμφηλῆισι περικρατέεσσιν ἐρυμνόν.
τῶν μέν θ’ ὥστε κυνῶν ὑλακὴ πέλει, οὐδέ τι τοίγε
ἄλλων ἀγνώσσουσι βροτῶν ὀνομάκλυτον αὐδήν.
Reference Edition: Leone, Tzetzae Historiae and White, Fragment of Simias
Translation Notes: It’s important in this text to translate the ancient Greek’s use of conjunctions (δὲ and τε) to signal the introduction of a new thought, in order to preserve the intentionally strong organization of this excerpt into a sequence of doublets (and one triplet). The third line’s ἔνθα δὲ is rendered as ‘And there where’ to clarify that it introduces a new location.
The adjective ὀνομάκλυτος seems best understood here with its standard, literal meaning of ‘famous,’ the point being that human speech is well-known even among those who don’t use it themselves. Most translations consider the word in this passage to mean ‘articulate,’ and Liddell-Scott (s.v. ὀνομακλήδην) even assigns the word a secondary meaning of ‘articulate’ just for this particular use in this Simias excerpt, which seems unsupported and moreover very unlikely given how far removed the sense of ‘articulate’ is from the component words ὄνομα (name) and κλυτός (renowned).
White in her edition argued that the first of two uses of ἐρυμνὰς, describing the islands, should be understood to mean ‘dark,’ thus half-agreeing with earlier editors who emended the word to ἐρεμνὰς, meaning ‘dark.’ White cited an entry in Hesychios (s.v. ἐρυμνόν) that gives σκοτεινόν (‘dark’) as an alternate meaning, and argued that a previously unrecognized use of ἐρυμνός to mean ‘dark’ is found in Apollonios’ Argonautica (1.219-221), where the manuscripts are divided between ἐρυμνός and ἐρεμνός and editors have preferred the latter. But ἐρυμνός makes excellent sense in its usual sense of ‘fortified’ both in this excerpt of Simias (see commentary) and in the cited passage of Apollonios (where “ἐρεμνὰς/ἐρυμνὰς ... πτέρυγας ... χρυσείαις φολίδεσσι διαυγέας” makes much better sense read as ‘fortified wings ... gleaming with golden horned scales’ than as ‘dark wings ... gleaming with golden horned scales’).
Edition Notes: Leone’s edition of Tzetzes, followed here except minor punctuation, differs from White’s edition of the Simias excerpt mainly by strongly favoring Tzetzes’ text over an independent transmission of the final five lines of Simias’ excerpt in Stephanos of Byzantion (Ethnikon, s.v. Ἡμίκυνες). The two versions are nearly identical in sense, but the wording and grammar of Tzetzes’ version seem better, with one caveat: the gender of the rare word κράς is thinly attested (see Liddell-Scott, s.v. κράς) and neither Tzetzes’ use of it as neutral nor Stephanos’ as masculine should be treated as decisive. Leone also declined to repair two metrical flaws: θο- of θοῶν is short where a long or two shorts are needed, and -σι of ναίουσι is short where a long is needed. It seems better to keep these metrical flaws transparent than to disguise them with potentially wrong restorations.
Leone’s and White’s editions dispensed with a large number of spurious emendations made by previous editors, most of which White adequately rebutted. However a few of these have been revived more recently by Marco Perale (Catalogo Geografico and Simias Fragments), including two particularly destructive emendations: changing the olive trees (ἐλαίαισι) to fir trees (έλάταισι), and changing the name of the Kampasos (Καμπάσος) river to Kaspasos (Κασπάσος). These are rebutted in the commentary.
Source of Date of Work: OCD, s.v. Sim(m)ias (2) of Rhodes
Commentary:
Simias of Rhodes was a poet and grammarian who can be dated only roughly to the early Hellenistic period. He is best known for composing the earliest pattern poems, with text arranged on the page to form a shape related to the topic. The poem from which this text is excerpted, known as the Apollo, was in an old-fashioned style, imitating archaic poetry’s early Ionic dialect, dactylic hexameter meter and other features. The Homeric epics, Hesiodic poetry and the Arimaspeia were all written in the archaic style that Simias was imitating in this excerpt.
This excerpt is preserved in a quotation by the 12th century Byzantine classicist Ioannis Tzetzes, and the final five lines were also quoted by Stephanos of Byzantion in his Ethnikon. Tzetzes quoted this excerpt immediately after quoting the Arimaspeia, introducing the Simias excerpt as follows:
Περὶ τῶν Ἡμικύνων δε τῶν καὶ Κυνοκεφάλων,
Σιμμιας ἐν Ἀπολλωνι κατ’ ἔπος οὕτω γράφει·
About the Half-dogs and the Dog-heads,
Simias in Apollo in verse thus writes:
Stephanos also identifies the five lines he quotes as Simias’ Apollo. Tzetzes adds the following line after quoting Simias:
Περὶ τῶν Ἡμικύνων μὲν Σιμμίας ταῦτα λέγει.
About the Half-dogs Simias says these things.
The content of the excerpt appears to imitate the Arimaspeia’s Apollo-aided flight over the earth, which judging from comments by Herodotos appears also to have been told in first-person narrative. Although this excerpt doesn’t mention any means of travel, there are multiple reasons to believe the narrator’s travel is aided or controlled by Apollo: the title of the poem (Apollo); the fast pace of the survey of the earth (covering three countries in thirteen verses); the visit to Hyperborea (not normally accessible to mortals); and a manuscript note accompanying another story told by Antoninus Liberalis, which identifies its story with Simias’ Apollo, indicating that the Apollo told a story of a man traveling multiple times to Hyperborea together with Apollo and Artemis.
Given these similarities to the Arimaspeia, it is likely, albeit uncertain, that this excerpt of Simias is describing a flight of the narrator’s disembodied soul, as Maximus of Tyre described Aristeas’ disembodied soul flying over and surveying the earth in the Arimaspeia (here and here). The pace of Simias’ journey, however, is surely much faster than the Arimaspeia, which had a reported length of three books (about an eighth of the length of a Homeric epic), whereas no source on Simias’ poem mentions it being longer than one book.
Tzetzes’ excerpt of Simias’ Apollo is strongly organized, list-like, into five couplets and one triplet. The narrator seems to have already traveled a great distance and reached near to the edge of the world before the excerpt begins, as the first place he visits in the excerpt is Hyperborea, at the very edge of the world. Notably the Rhipai mountains, which in the Arimaspeia separate Hyperborea from the rest of the world, are not mentioned in this excerpt.
For the first couplet, about Hyperborea, Simias’ source appears to be Pindar (Pythian 10, to come in this collection), the earliest extant source of the story of Perseus’ visit to Hyperborea. The Hyperboreans were of course also an important part of the Arimaspeia, and the Arimaspeia might also have mentioned the visit of Perseus. But the evidence for that is merely suggestive. Besides this excerpt of Simias, another text that partly imitates the Arimaspeia – the tragedy Prometheus Bound attributed to Aischylos also includes the story of Perseus’ mission to Hyperborea (to come in this collection). No ancient source explicitly attributes any story about Perseus to the Arimaspeia.
There is strong reason to believe that the first couplet of this excerpt describes just one of Simias’ narrator’s multiple visits to Hyperborea. This is suggested by Antoninus Liberalis’ story, in which the main character witnesses a sacrifice of a hekatomb of asses to Apollo while in Hyperborea.
The second couplet can be traced ultimately to the Arimaspeia, which was apparently the earliest known text to mention the Massagetai. Herodotos locates the Massagetai (to come in this collection) next to the Issedones, an ethnonym that appears to be known only from the Arimaspeia and traditions of interpreting it, and the Massagetai and Issedones are grouped together in Pliny the Elder’s geography (to come in this collection).
The special emphasis given in this couplet to the horse-riding and archery of the Massagetai is likely to be Simias’ own selectivity. In Herodotos’ description (to come in this collection), the Massagetai have both cavalry and infantry, and they fight with bows, spears and axes. Simias’ emphasis appears to have influenced the more widely read Hellenistic poet Kallimachos, who wrote about a generation or two after Simias and included a brief mention of the Massagetai shooting arrows far (Μασσαγέται καὶ μακρὸν ὀϊστεύοιεν) in his partly preserved poem the Aitia (I.15). Simias clearly influenced a Hellenic-Egyptian-Jewish prophetic text of the early 2nd century CE, which mentioned Massagetai “who love war and trust in bows” (Sybilline Oracles, 5:117: Μασσαγέτας τε φιλοπτολέμους τόξοισί τε πιστούς), using wording very close to Simias’ (τόξοισι πεποιθότες).
The third couplet, on the Kampasos river and the sea it flows into, probably also stems from the Arimaspeia. The sea is certainly the same sea that the Araxes flows into, which can be seen from the following couplet’s description of fluvial islands, similar to those described by Herodotos and Strabo in their descriptions of the Massagetai and the Kura-Araxes delta (to come in this collection). Thus the sea is either the Caspian Sea or its more vaguely known equivalent in archaic cosmology: an eastern sea that adjoins the world-encircling river Okeanos, described in the Odyssey’s account of the eastern edge of the world (to come in this collection).
Although the adjective θεσπέσιός (divine) can mean simply ‘wondrous’ or ‘amazing,’ and in Homeric epic it is formulaic to call the sea δῖος (godly), Simias’ doubled use of terms for divine and immortal – the river is θεσπέσιός (divine) and its streams are ἀενάος (ever-flowing), the sea is ἀθάνατος (immortal) and δῖος (divine) – suggests that these are more than poetic hyperbole. This description might mimic the Arimaspeia, and if so it might indicate that this river and sea were considered to have a vaunted status, perhaps because of their proximity to the edge of the world. In the Odyssey’s account, the eastern sea contains the island home of the goddess Kirke, whose divine relatives also figured in the myth of Jason’s journey to the eastern edge of the world. The word Simias uses for sea, ἅλς, certainly does not refer to the world-encircling river of archaic flat-earth cosmology, Okeanos, which was imagined to be fresh water and was always clearly distinguished from sea.
The derivation of the Kampasos from the Arimaspeia can be surmised from the appearance of two similarly named and otherwise unknown rivers, the Caspasus and Kampylinus, each grouped together with one or more known elements of the Arimaspeia by different Roman-era writers. Pliny the Elder (to come in this collection) placed the Caspasus river in north-central Asia, north of the Iaxartes river (modern Syr Darya), together with the Massagetai, Issedones and Arimasps. And Aelian (to come in this collection) placed a Kampylinus river together with the Issedones in the same country as ‘the ants.’ Presumably Aelian meant the gold-digging ‘ants,’ presumably marmots whose tunneling happened to bring up gold dust, described by Herodotos (3.102) in the mountains of northern India. The story of the Indian ‘ants’ probably became entangled with elements of the Arimaspeia due to their superficial similarity to the Arimaspeia’s griffins, who extracted gold from the Rhipai mountains (to come in this collection). The absence of these toponyms from all other descriptions of those areas strongly suggests that neither Caspasus nor Kampylinus were genuine locally used toponyms for rivers in those areas; instead they appear to be two differently confused attempts to locate a single river known from the Arimaspeia. It is also possible, but more uncertain, that a river called the Karambyka, which appeared in a book about Hyperborea by the early Hellenistic writer Hekataios of Abdera, cited in Stephanos’ Ethnikon and mapped in Ptolemy’s geography (to come in this collection), could be related to the Kampasos.
Two other toponyms similar to Kampasos are found in the south Caucasus, near to the middle or lower Kura river, the outlet of which is a joint delta with the Araxes. The first of these toponyms is the Cambyses river, described by Pliny (to come in this collection) flowing from the Caucasus into the Caspian Sea north of the Kura. The second is Kambisene, described by Strabo (to come in this collection) as a region between Iberia and Albania on the north side of the Kura river. Kambisene was clearly a locally used toponym, as the same region continued to be called Kambečan by medieval Armenian writers (to come in this collection). Today the former Kambisene region straddles the border between Georgia and Azerbaijan.
There is also an instance of a personal name Campesus, of a warrior in the Latin Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus (5.590 and 6.243), that is likely related to Kampasos. Campesus is a fellow of Aeetes (Greek Aietes, owner of the Golden Fleece, brother of Kirke and father of Medeia). Many other characters in the Latin epic have names obviously taken from rivers: Ochus, Hebrus, Halys, Iaxartes, Choaspes, Strymon and others less well-known (see Krasne, Names in Valerius).
Recently Marco Perale (Catalogo Geografico and Simias Fragments) revived an old idea (also in Fränkel, De Simia, F1) that Pliny’s ‘Caspasus’ better preserves the name used by Simias, and so emended Καμπάσου to Κασπάσου. This must be rejected in favor of the much better evidence for the version of the name with an ‘m’: especially Cambysene and Kambisene, of which the latter is proved to have been locally used. By contrast no one besides Pliny mentions a river with a name more similar to Caspasus than Simias’ Kampasos. The nearest other toponyms are: the very common Kaspios and Caspius, referring to the Caspian Sea or to people, mountains or passes near it; Kaspatyros, a city Herodotos (3.102) placed in the mountains of northern India near the gold-digging ‘ants’; and Kaspeira, Ptolemy’s (7.1) name for Kashmir. Perale’s novel position is that Caspasus is another name for the Oxus river (modern Amu Darya). This fails mainly because Pliny located the Caspasus north of the Iaxartes (Syr Darya) (to come in this collection), and because Pliny separately described the Oxus with unusual clarity: Pliny is the only classical geographer to separately describe the Uzboy river (Natural History, 6.18/48), considered by him and all ancient geographers to be the lower Oxus, and to mention the Uzboy’s source in the Sarygamysh lake (called ‘Oaxus’). Perale proposed that the name of Kaspatyros (3.102) could be related to a name used for the upper Oxus, although Herodotos located that town on the opposite side of the Hindu Kush from the Oxus’ sources in Bactria, and its name seems more likely related to Kaspeira (Kashmir). The origin of the name Caspasus seems most simply explained as a mutation from Kampasos influenced by Kaspios or Caspius.
The fourth couplet, on the reed-covered islands, must mimic either the Arimaspeia or a later tradition of describing the Massagetai and their environment near the Araxes, represented by Herodotos and Strabo (who apparently drew on Herodotos and the lost work of his contemporary Hellanikos). These ‘islands’ sound like the commingling of fluvial islands and marshy reed beds typically found in river deltas. Although not explicitly stated, it seems strongly implied that these islands and marshes are the Kampasos’ delta. The reeds sound like giant reeds (Arundo donax), and the ‘olives’ sound like oleaster (Elaeagnus), both well-known inhabitants of river deltas in eastern Europe and western Asia. Oleaster is a thick bush or small bushy tree that grows on riverbanks and the perimeters of delta islands, and the most common species (E. angustifolia) is thorny. So the image Simias has drawn of fluvial islands overhung with high reeds and ‘fortified’ with ‘olives’ is realistic, and the Greek word used for ‘fortified,’ ἐρυμνὰς, adheres closely in this couplet to its etymology, from ἔρυμα, ‘fence.’ While the river delta near the Massagetai was traditional, Simias likely drew from some experience of his own with reeds and oleaster.
The appearance of olive trees on these islands might also allude to the traditional association of Hyperboreans with olive trees: according to a story told by Pindar (to come in this collection), Herakles brought the olive trees that grew at the sanctuary to Zeus at Olympos from Hyperborea. Pindar referred to the Olympian olives with the same general term for olive used here (ἐλαία), whereas Aristophanes (Plutos 586 and 943) referred to the Olympian olives with a specific term for wild olive (κότινος), also used in the Pindar scholia and discussed in the Aristophanes scholia (Chantry, Scholia Vetera, 586).
Other studies of this excerpt have been less attentive to botany, leading to strange results. In another spurious emendation recently revived by Perale (Catalogo Geografico and Simias Fragments), editors have often changed the ‘olives,’ ἐλαίαισι, to firs, ἐλάταισι (earlier so in Powell, Alexandrina, Simias F1; Fränkel, De Simia, F1; Bergk, Miscellanea, 282). This was originally done because editors thought the -αί- of ἐλαίαισι could only be read as long, which would spoil the meter. But White (Fragment of Simias) showed the -αί- can be read as short because it precedes a vowel. Perale’s justification for reviving the firs was that the adjective ὑψίκομος, ‘high-canopied’ or ‘high-topped,’ is typically applied to tall trees, for example to oaks by Hesiod (Works and Days, 509) and firs by the late classical poet Quintus of Smyrna (5.119), who Perale suggested could have copied Simias. Perale missed that Simias applied the term ὑψίκομος to the reeds, presumably in order to allusively liken the reeds to tall trees, which would have made little sense if Simias meant the reeds to be standing under actual tall trees. Besides, firs in the ancient Greek area are highland trees, never found in river deltas, and they grow widely separated, hardly comparable to a defensive wall. Quintus was describing Mount Pelias, so not likely drawing from Simias’ description of a river delta.
The final triplet and couplet, on the half-dog men, draw primarily from Ktesias, whose account of Dog-heads (BNJ Ktesias F45, F45p) was widely copied, especially the account of them only barking themselves but able to understand human speech (e.g. Pliny, Natural History, 7.23, also has that story). But the name that Simias used for his dog-headed men, ‘half-dog men’ (ἡμίκυνες ἄνδρες), is not drawn from Ktesias, who used the name Dog-heads (Κυνοκέφαλοι), as did Herodotos (4.191.3), and numerous other writers who copied their stories about dog-headed men.
The source of Simias’ name ἡμίκυνες ἄνδρες must be the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, and namely a story within it known as the Flight of the Harpies (F150-159). This is a somewhat similar story to the Arimaspeia and Simias’ Apollo of a flight over the world, except that it involves the Boreads (sons of Boreas, god of the north wind) engaged in a high-speed flying chase of the Harpies. The Boreads and Harpies traverse the world at a pace much faster even than the Apollo’s narrator, often introducing two or three nations per verse. The story is only partly preserved, mostly on a badly damaged papyrus, on which no dog-headed men are found. But multiple ancient or medieval sources cite Hesiod using the name Half-dogs (Ἡμίκυνες) (F153), without identifying in which poem. Since that name shows up in this excerpt of Simias’ Apollo, and Simias obviously would have had reason to consult the Flight of the Harpies when composing the Apollo, we can infer fairly confidently that Simias found the name Ἡμίκυνες in the Flight of the Harpies.
Both sources for this excerpt, Tzetzes and Stephanos, explicitly declared that they were excerpting the lines from the Apollo about the half-dog men. So most likely the Apollo said nothing more about them. Nevertheless it’s possible that the lines that followed this excerpt described the place where the half-dog men lived. In Ktesias’ account, the Dog-heads lived in the mountains north of India, and in Herodotos’ account, they lived in a mountainous western region of Africa. It’s even possible that Simias might have next described mountains in northern India and then continued to describe other stories about the region, perhaps even locating the Arimaspeia’s Issedones in that area together with Herodotos’ gold-digging ‘ants,’ as Aelian did much later. It’s also possible that the half-dog men were meant to be understood to be living on the fluvial islands described in the excerpt’s fourth couplet. The very similar phrases used to describe the islands and the dog-heads can be taken as a hint to that effect: the islands are ἐλαίαισι περιχλωρῇσιν ἐρυμνὰς, ‘fortified with olive trees,’ and the half-dog men are γαμφηλῆισι περικρατέεσσιν ἐρυμνός, ‘fortified with tenacious jaws’.
Summing up, this excerpt of Simias’ Apollo is closest in its content to the Arimaspeia, but it also draws on Ktesias, Pindar and the Hesiodic Catalogue’s Flight of the Harpies, roughly in that order of importance. The title of the poem and the evidence that the poem included additional material on Hyperborea further strengthen its association with the Arimaspeia. The first four couplets of Simias’ excerpt might all cover territory that was covered in the Arimaspeia: Hyperborea surely was; the Massagetai nearly certainly were also, and they and their country probably represented the easternmost people and land in the Arimaspeia’s known world; the Kampasos river almost certainly was in the Arimaspeia, flowing towards the eastern sea; and the Kampasos delta perhaps also was described in the Arimaspeia, although that could have been drawn from a later tradition of identifying the Kampasos with the Kyros and the Kyros-Araxes joint delta. The Kampasos appears to have been at least loosely based on a real river that flowed through or by Kampisene on its way to the eastern sea, as the Kura and its left-bank tributaries the Iori and Alazani do before they join the Kura and flow towards the Caspian. It seems likely that the southeast Caucasus was still very poorly known at the time the Arimaspeia was written, and the Arimaspeia’s description of the Kampasos might well have been half-fantastic and not exactly matching any real river. After the couplet on the fluvial islands, Simias clearly departed from the Arimaspeia, and for the rest of the Apollo only the probably much-altered derivative story told by Antoninus Liberalis is preserved.
Simias’ narrator seems to be flying southeast away from Hyperborea in this excerpt, begging the question of where he was going. If the Babylonian home of the main character in Antoninus’ story was shared by the narrator of Simias’ Apollo, he could perhaps have been returning there. It is also possible the Arimaspeia’s description of the Massagetai (and if so, presumably also the Kimmerians) were part of Aristeas’ return journey from Hyperborea. However, it seems unlikely that the Apollo’s narrator merely flew to Hyperborea and back without stopping. So it seems more natural to interpret this passage as a wandering or exploratory flight, preliminary to a longer visit to Hyperborea. The appearance of the half-dog men with features drawn from Ktesias suggests the next place visited might well have been over the Hindu Kush, but unless another fragment of the Apollo turns up, we’ll never know.
This analysis runs counter to readings that identify the Flight of the Harpies as the main inspiration for Simias’ Apollo (most recently: Perale, Catalogo Geografico, earlier: Evelyn-White, Hesiodea III). While the Flight of the Harpies does probably share two ethnonyms with this excerpt of the Apollo, Hyperboreans and Half-dogs, and the non-extant parts of the Apollo very likely contained other names in common with the Flight of the Harpies, the latter is too cursory for Simias to have followed it closely. The most problematic aspect of the assumption that Simias’ Apollo closely followed the Flight of the Harpies is that it has led to a widely cited misleading restoration of the text of the Flight of the Harpies, which makes it appear that the Massagetai appeared in it. In a 1916 article, Hugh Evelyn-White proposed an emendation based on his assumption that Simias’ excerpt was largely based on the Flight of the Harpies, which inserted the Massagetai and Half-dogs into the text of the damaged papyrus copy in locations where only the first letter of Half-dogs and not a single letter of Massagetai can be read (Evelyn-White, Hesiodea III). He then printed these emendations in his 1920 Loeb edition (Evelyn-White, Hesiod Homerica, F40a, 602-608). Evelyn-White’s emendations have not been accepted by other editors, and are not found in the current Loeb edition, but were recently used by Perale (Catalog Geografico) as evidence linking Simias’ Apollo to the Flight of the Harpies. Also, because the 1920 Loeb edition is the most authoritative English translation of the Hesiodic Catalogue’s fragments not under copyright, it is still widely reproduced on the internet. So it’s worth making this doubly clear: there is no evidence of any kind that the Massagetai were mentioned in the Hesiodic Flight of the Harpies.
Aside from the Antoninus Liberalis story included in this collection, four other fragments have been attributed by scholars to Simias’ Apollo, including three short fragments of Simias that were questionably attributed specifically to the Apollo in Iohannes Powell’s collection of Simias’ fragments (Powell, Alexandrina, Simias F3-F5) and one papyrus attributed to the Apollo by Lamberto Di Gregorio (Frammenti di Simia). On these Perale correctly argues (Apollo Misattribution) against considering these fragments of Simias’ Apollo. The attributions of these fragments are simply too uncertain to provide reliable information about the Apollo, and in any case, they certainly offer no help in understanding the Arimaspeia.
When researching Simias of Rhodes be aware that his name has since ancient times been written either Simias or Simmias. Specialists tend to prefer Simias as the Rhodian spelling, but Simmias is also still in use.
Concordance: Perale, Simias Fragments, The Apollo; Perale, Catalogo Geografico, 368-369; White, Fragment of Simias; Bolton, Aristeas, 68; Powell, Alexandrina, Simias F1; Fränkel, De Simia, F1; Stephanos, Ethnikon, s.v. Ἡμίκυνες