November 11, 1824 (twice)
November 5, 1820
Kevin McGrane, Page 82, Footnote 185
Simonides’ own ‘canonical’ account up to the end of 1862 was that
he was born in Hydra in 1824. The Biographical Review published August 1859 states (p.2) ‘Constantine
L. Ph. Simonides was born in the island of Hydra, in the year 1824’. In the appendix to that work is a
detailed description of the activities of Simonides’ father from the outbreak of the Greek Revolution
commencing 1821, in which he was wounded. ‘On his recovery he returned to Syme, in 1823, and was
then married to his betrothed, Maria…[and] soon after returned to Hydra, with his wife, and here
their son Simonides was born, November 11th, 1824.’, p.74. Since the beginning of the Greek
Revolution in 1821 is a fixed date, then unless this is all a pack of lies (always possible!), Simonides
was born on Hydra in 1824. He stated his age as 33 (=32 in ‘English’ reckoning) in Leipzig in 1856. In
England in 1861 and 1862 he both stated that he was born November 11, 1824 and that he was 15
when he arrived at Athos in 1839. He appears on the UK 1861 census, living in Formby, Lancashire in
the home of his Greek friend Constantine Pappa. His place of birth is given as Hydra, Greece, and his
occupation is listed as ‘Author of various books’. His specified age, 33 as of April 1861 however,
would indicate a date of birth of 1827. The Panteleimon monastery states that he was a мальчик (a
male child not completed puberty) when he arrived in 1839, almost certainly under 16, which
indicates a birth date no earlier than 1824. In a letter of December 13, 1861 to The Athenaeum (see
December 21, 1861, p.849), Simonides had written, commenting on the article of December 7 that he
‘came from Syme’: ‘If you have any curiosity to know the place of my birth, I may tell you that I was
born in the town of Hydra, in the island of Hydra, on the 11th of November, A.D. 1824.’ In Simonides’
1864 work The Periplus of Hannon, Simonides forges a change to his birth date when directly quoting
from the 1859 Biographical Memoir and from his 1861 letter published in The Athenaeum: it is now
November 5, 1820, though the place of birth remains Hydra. A switch to a birth date of November 5,
1820, and on the island of Syme, was made in early 1863. About this time Simonides was forging
correspondence with his imaginary Kallinikos, backdated to 1852-3 and supposedly lithographed in
Moscow and Odessa in 1853-4, the purpose of which was to fake a visit to Mount Sinai in 1852, move
his birthday back to 1820. The forged Kallinikos correspondence is seen to be in transition: the
birthplace is still Hydra, but the date has become November 5, 1820. Simonides first mentions these
lithographs in March 1863. Concerning these, Farrer in his Literary Forgeries (London, 1907) p.62 asks,
‘But were these letters really lithographed in the years assigned to them in the frontispiece? May they
not have been concocted by Simonides in 1863 and then antedated by ten years in order to support his
claim?’. Indeed so. They were concocted between October 1862 and March 1863.
https://www.academia.edu/37556820/A...iled_background_of_the_discovery_of_the_Codex
