Some of this material has been accidentally transferred from the entry on Semonides to sigma 431, Simmias, which reads: 'He was originally a Samian. In the colonization of Amorgos he himself was also appointed leader by the Samians. He established Amorgos as three poleis (city-states), Minoia, Aigialos, Arkesime. He was born 406 years after the Trojan War. And he wrote, according to some, first iambics [?'the first iambics'], and other different (genres) and the Archaeology (sc. Early history) of the Samians'.
This writer was known as Simonides of Amorgos in antiquity. The name Semonides occurs in antiquity only on a fragment of Philodemus (De Poet. = PHerc 1074 fr. F, col. III 5, ed. Sbordone), who elsewhere mentions Simonides of Ceos, and in a citation of Choeroboscus in Etym. Gen. et Magn. 713.17. It is generally accepted that he was born on Samos and joined in the Samian colonization of the island Amorgos. Proclus also mentions that some called him a Samian. He would thus be a contemporary of Archilochus in the 7th. Century BC, and the date given here might be correct.
His best known surviving fragment proposes that women derive their qualities from different animals, and is much used as a source for the study of ancient Greek male attitudes towards women. His iambic poetry anticipates in its pessimism, obscenity and sense of amusement those aspects of Roman satire.
A fragment of an elegy based on Homer's simile "As is the generation of leaves" (Iliad 6.146-9), quoted in Stobaeus (4.34.28) as by Simonides, but formerly attributed by Bergk and others to Semonides (frag.29 Diehl), proves, from the evidence of the "new Simonides" POxy 3965, fr.26, to be a joining of two fragments by Simonides of Ceos (see sigma 439). But see Hubbard's dissent.