Simonides has long been known to have written epitaphs for those who died in the Persian Wars and this has resulted in many pithy verses being misattributed to him "... as wise saws to Confucius or musical anecdotes to Beecham." Modern scholars generally consider only one of the attributed epigrams to be unquestionably authentic (an inscription for the seer Megistius quoted by Herodotus), which places in doubt even some of the most famous examples, such as the one to the Spartans at Thermopylae, quoted in the introduction. He composed longer pieces on a Persian War theme, including "Dirge for the Fallen at Thermopylae", "Battle at Artemisium" and "Battle at Salamis" but their genres are not clear from the fragmentary remains - the first was labelled by Diodorus Siculus as an "encomium" but it was probably a hymn and the second was characterized in the Suda as elegiac yet Priscian, in a comment on prosody, indicated that it was composed in lyric meter. Substantial fragments of a recently discovered poem, describing the run-up to the Battle of Plataea and comparing Pausanias to Achilles, show that he actually did compose narrative accounts in elegiac meter. Simonides also wrote "Paeans" and "Prayers/Curses" () and possibly in some genres where no record of his work survives.