Pindar (522-438 B.C.), the greatest Greek lyric poet, brought choral poetry to perfection. Unlike the personal lyrics of his predecessors, his works were meant to be recited by choruses of young men and women and accompanied by music.

Pindar was born at Cynoscephalae, near Thebes, in Boeotia of a very prominent aristocratic family, the Aegeidae, who traced their genealogy back to Aegeus and even to Cadmus of Thebes with connections in Sparta, Thera, and Cyrene. He was the son of Daiphantus and Cleodice. His family seems to have had considerable interest in music, especially in flute-playing, which became important at Delphi in the worship of Apollo and was perfected and highly regarded at Thebes. Having received his elementary education under Scopelinus in Thebes, he was sent to Athens, where he was educated under Apollodorus, Agathocles, and Lasus of Hermione, a competitor of Simonides. It was Lasus who is reputed to have written the first treatise on music, brought to the voice a harmonized flute accompaniment, and perfected the dithyramb.

Returning to Thebes, Pindar competed in poetry contests with Myrtis and Corinna, the latter winning over him and advising him, because of his penchant for including an overwhelming amount of mythological allusions, "to sow with the hand, not with the whole sack." At 20, he composed his first ode, Pythian Ode X. His earliest preserved Olympian Ode was composed in 484. Pindar traveled extensively throughout the Greek world and achieved a Panhellenic reputation and numerous commissions. For Hiero I, the tyrant of Syracuse, he wrote encomia, as well as for Alexander I of Macedon, Archelaus of Cyrene, Theron of Agrigentum, the Thessalian Aleuadae, and the Alcmeonid Megacles. In Hiero, Pindar thought he saw a champion of civilized Hellenism against the forces of barbarism. He visited Sicily and was familiar with other Sicilians, notably the tyrant of Acragas, Theron, and his nephew, Thrasyboulus.

Mention should also be made of Pindar's relation with the island of Aegina. Eleven of his odes were written for Aeginetan victors. This is remarkable since it constitutes nearly one-fourth of his total output. Aegina (whose founding nymph, Aegina, was reputed to be a sister of Thebe) was subjected to Athenian imperial aggression during the Peloponnesian War, and Pindar in Pythian Ode VIII may be cloaking a criticism of this policy. He did not tire of praising the Aeacidae, Peleus and Telamon, and their offspring, Achilles and Ajax.

Thebes's unfortunate capitulation to the Persians during the Persian Wars (480-479 B.C.) and cooperation with the invading enemy left Pindar a distressed member of a disgraced and defeated state. Though apparently sympathetic to Athens, he was in no position to sing Athens's praises too loudly, even after Thebes became a subject ally of Athens about 457.

Pindar may have visited the games. At Delphi, he was particularly honored. Even his descendants are reported to have been given special recognition because of their progenitor. He was married to Timoxena and had one son, Daiphantus, and two daughters, Protomache and Eumetis.

Works and Thought

Not all of Pindar's works have been preserved. He composed hymns, paeans, prosodia (processionals), dithyrambs, parthenia (maiden songs), hyporchemata (dance songs), encomia, dirges, and epinikia (victory odes in honor of athletic heroes). Forty-four of the victory odes celebrate winners of Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games, which were religious as well as athletic occasions. These odes are brilliant in form but difficult and complex. Richmond Lattimore (1947) observes, "Competition [in the games] symbolized an idea of nobility which meant much to Pindar; and in the exaltation of victory he seems sometimes to see a kind of transfiguration, briefly making radiant a world which most of the time seemed, to him as to his contemporaries, dark and brutal."

An epinikion was sung by a chorus of men or boys at a private occasion for the winner, his family, and friends - any of these people having commissioned it. Apparently, contracts were made specifying fees, details about the winner and his family to be included, and mythical allusions to be interwoven in the commemorative ode. The victor, the event, and the festival had to be indicated, and the poet had to laud the winner for his excellence, as well as offer felicitations to his family and state. Pindar does all this skillfully. He weaves the facts into the ode gradually and highlights not the victor but the festival, the aristocratic descent of the victor, a mythological event suggested by the life of the victor, or a myth connected with the holy occasion, the victor, or the victor's native place. This "myth" constitutes the heart of the ode. The technical structure is prooimion (prelude), arche (beginning), katatrope (first transition), omphalos (center), metakatatrope (second transition), exodion (conclusion), and sphragis (seal). The transitions are important and often quite abrupt. There are three stanzas: strophe, antistrophe, and epode.

Pindar was aristocratic in temper, Panhellenic in spirit, and proud of his noble background. Profoundly religious and moral, he "corrected" myths to ensure religious orthodoxy. He saw properly used wealth as an honor to this world, but he also spoke of the next world. He believed in the righteousness of the gods, in the supremacy of Zeus, and in the majesty and justice of Apollo, and it is of Apollo that he saw himself the servant.

Pindar reflects an oligarchic society that was threatened by the rise of democratic Athens. John H. Finley, Jr. (1947), states: "Victory to Pindar is itself only a figure for this state of being, which is a mark of the divine in the world. Hence victory and poetry, different as they are, are equally dependent upon the gods, whose hand is increasingly seen in the late poems in friendship and inner harmony also." Pindar is a poet of light, which he sees most closely associated with the gods. Finely points out that Pindar tries "to grasp the bright chain that binds men to gods or, better, the radiance that descends from gods to men, touching events with the divine completeness."

So great a reputation did Pindar achieve that it is reported that when Alexander the Great devastated Thebes, only Pindar's house was left untouched.

Further Reading

An excellent collection of Pindar's work is Selected Odes, translated with interpretative essays by Carl A.P. Ruck and William H. Matheson (1968); each ode is introduced with an essay setting forth the occasion, structure, and theme of the poem. Other collections include Thomas D. Seymour, Selected Odes of Pindar (1882), and Richmond Lattimore, The Odes of Pindar (1947). Among the critical studies are John H. Finley, Jr., Pindar and Aeschylus (1947), a sensitive exposition of Pindar's use of myth and image; C. M. Bowra, Pindar (1965), intended as a critical introduction but filled with undiscussed and often unfamiliar allusions; and Mary A. Grant, Folktale and Hero-tale Motifs in the Odes of Pindar (1967).

For more information on Pindar, visit Britannica.com.

Pindar (Pindaros) (518–after 446 BC), Greek lyric poet, born near Thebes in Boeotia, famous for his Epinician (‘victory’) Odes written in honour of the victors at the four great panhellenic Games. These odes are accordingly grouped as Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian, commonly abbreviated to O., P., N., I.

Very little is known about Pindar's life. Legend relates that he received instruction in composition from the Boeotian poetess Corinna, and that he went to Athens for his musical education. His devotion to the god Apollo was rewarded by special privileges at Delphi. His attitude to the great historical events of his time was panhellenic rather than narrowly bound by local loyalties; thus he saw the Persian invasions as a threat to Greece as a whole and her deliverance as a blessing. His personal feelings about the consequences to Thebes of her pro-Persian policy cannot be ascertained, though he laments the sorrow and loss that war brought her; his admiration for Athens seems to have been unaffected by the mutual animosity of the two cities. It is said that he was fined by his countrymen for his praises of Athens, but that the Athenians paid him the amount of the fine twice over. Some of his greatest odes were for the Sicilian tyrants, particularly Hieron I of Syracuse. He attained great fame in his lifetime, and was soon quoted as an authority (e.g. by Herodotus and Plato). In the destruction of Thebes in 335 (a punishment for her revolt against Macedonian rule) Alexander the Great ordered Pindar's house to be spared; its ruins were still visible when Pausanias visited Thebes c. AD 150.

Pindar's numerous poems, which included all the chief forms of choral lyric, were grouped by the Alexandrian scholars into seventeen books according to their types. Of these only the four books of Epinician Odes survive, virtually entire, in manuscript. The rest are known mostly from quotations, although discoveries of papyri in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have greatly augmented our knowledge.

Pindar wrote in the literary Dorian dialect but used epic forms as well, particularly for mythical narratives. Close analysis reveals that the odes follow a conventional pattern of praise; but the poet's skill succeeds in intertwining rather disparate elements into an artistic whole, and the reader's attention is distracted from the technical aspects of the composition by the rapid and varied flow of the poetry. The essentially repetitious nature of the subject-matter is not particularly obvious even when the forty-four odes are read in sequence, as their author can hardly have supposed they would be; the reader marvels rather at the variety. Pindar has complete control over his medium, and his technique is distinguished by constant variation, complexity, and vitality. Some of his sentences are long and periodic, others are arrestingly short. Sometimes (especially in the later odes) the language seems almost stark, stripped of ornament, and the word order simple and prosaic; in other odes the language is rich and magnificent, the word order intricate. Myths are narrated economically, allusively, and vividly. The poet is skilful at building up climaxes within the ode. Transitions from one topic to another are sometimes made abruptly for rhetorical effect, sometimes unobtrusively. Metaphors and metonomies (e.g. the variety of words used to express ‘victory’) abound.

The Epinician Odes are written from an essentially religious standpoint; it is this background that imparts grandeur to Pindar's themes and language. Men are nothing by themselves: success is god-given; but men attain an almost divine happiness at the moment of success. The poet himself has a skill that is god-given and cannot be taught; he is ‘the mouthpiece of the Muses’. Zeus and Apollo are the gods most often invoked. The gods favour those who have struggled hard for their victory, but the victors are those whose breeding makes them worthy of it; Pindar admires aristocratic qualities, the beauty and strength fostered in the gymnasium, wealth and standing, courage and preparedness, the aristocratic institution of guest-friendship, traditional worship of the gods, devotion to family and homeland; and he warns against the unjust use of power and the envy from lesser men which success brings in its train. The qualities which he admires he sees exhibited in the heroes of old, and especially Heracles, the hero most often cited in the Odes. Pindar treats myth with freedom and with sensitivity to its appropriateness, always in a way that comports with the dignity of the occasion.

Horace, in the opening stanzas of Odes IV. 2, praised Pindar's rushing eloquence, bold originality in metres and diction, and admirable use of myth, and believed that his own odes could never reach such heights. Quintilian shared the general view that Pindar was by far the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. In modern times poets have tried to imitate his free-flowing, vigorous style with varying degrees of success. Of English odes, those of the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden, Song for St Cecilia's Day and Alexander's Feast, and of the eighteenth-century poet Thomas Gray, Progress of Poesy and The Bard, capture something of the true feeling.

(pĭn'dər) , 518?–c.438 B.C., Greek poet, generally regarded as the greatest Greek lyric poet. A Boeotian of noble birth, he lived principally at Thebes. He traveled widely, staying for some time at Athens and in Sicily at the court of Hiero I at Syracuse and also at Acragas (modern Agrigento). His chief medium was the choral lyric, and he set the standard for the triumphal ode or epinicion. Of his complete works 45 odes survive; these make one of the greatest collections of poems by a single author in Greek. His fragments are exceptionally numerous and some of them widely famous. The epinicia celebrate victories in athletic games: there are 14 Olympian odes, 12 Pythian odes, 11 Nemean odes, and 8 Isthmian odes. Each was written to be sung in a procession for the victor, usually on his return to his home city. The outstanding feature of each ode is its narrative myth, which is always connected with the winner. The myth makes appropriate the elevated moral tone and religious flavor characteristic of Pindar's poems. His style loses a great deal in translation. It has a high-flown diction and an intricate word order, dependent partly upon the complexity of his metrical requirements. Pindar wrote on commissions, but he was quite independent of any meretriciousness, because of his lofty conception of the poet's vocation.

The term Pindaric ode refers to a verse form used primarily in England in the 17th and 18th cent. The form, based on a somewhat faulty understanding of the metrical pattern used by Pindar, originated with Abraham Cowley in his Pindarique Odes (1656) and was later used by John Dryden, among others. It is characterized by irregularity in the rhyme scheme, length of the stanzas, and number of stresses in a line.

Bibliography

See his works (tr. by L. R. Farnell, 1930–32); his odes (tr. by R. Lattimore, 1976); studies by F. T. Nisetich (1980) and K. Crotty (1982).

Quotes:

"A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality."

"Men are the dreams of a shadow."

"Learn what you are and be such."

"Whatever is beautiful is beautiful by necessity."

"Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed."

"The days that are still to come are the wisest witnesses."

See more famous quotes by Pindar

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