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522 - 446
Pindarus, Pindar, (Pindaros). The greatest of the Greek lyric
poets, son of Daiphantos, was born at or near Thebes, B.C. 522. He belonged to
a noble and priestly family and was carefully educated. His musical training was
received from the best masters of the time, among whom is mentioned, perhaps without
sufficient warrant, Lasos of Hermione, the regenerator of the dithyramb. Familiar
is the story of his unsuccessful contest with Corinna, and of the advice which
she gave the youthful poet when he crowded the opening of one of his hymns with
mythological figures: "Sow with the hand and not with the whole sack."
Pindar began his career as a local poet early in life, and the Tenth Pythian,
which is said to have been composed when he was only twenty years old, shows all
the elements of his future greatness. By the time of the Persian War Pindar had
risen to the position of a national poet, and though he was a good Theban and
a stanch aristocrat, though he was bound by the ties of his family, which belonged
to the old nobility, and by the ties of his people, who sided with the Persians,
he was too true a Greek, too thoroughly Pan-Hellenic not to be proud of the victory
of the Greeks of Attica over the Persians, and the victory of the Greeks of Sicily
over the Carthaginians. According to the well-known story the high praise which
he bestowed on Athens as the "Stay of Greece" roused the indignation
of the Thebans, who imposed on him a heavy fine, which the Athenians reimbursed
twofold, adding, as is further reported, a statue and other honours. Like the
other lyric poets of his time, Pindar travelled far and wide in fulfilment of
his calling, though, doubtless, he often sent his song instead of going himself.
A long sojourn in Sicily is beyond a doubt, and Aegina, which he loved only next
to Thebes, must have been to him a second home; nor is it unlikely that he knew
Macedon in the North and Cyrene in the South. He was received everywhere with
veneration and bore himself as a peer of princes. And not only was he honoured
by the highest on earth, but the gods themselves are said to have shown him special
favour and to have sent him at last the boon of a swift and easy death as he rested
his head on the lap of his favourite in the theatre or in the gymnasium of Argos.
The date of that death we do not know with certainty, but his life can hardly
have been prolonged much beyond the middle of the fifth century. The reverence
felt for the poet in his lifetime was paid to his genius after his death, and
when Thebes was pillaged and destroyed by the Macedonian soldiery in the next
century, the house of Pindar was spared by the express order of Alexander the
Great, whose ancestor he had celebrated in song.
Pindar was a consummate master of the whole domain of lyric
poetry, as is shown by the fragments of his hymns (humnoi), his paeans (paianes),
his dancing-songs (huporchemata), his processional songs (prosodia), his songs
for choruses of virgins (parthenia), his songs of praise (enkomia), his drinking-songs
(paroinia) and catches (skolia), his dithyrambs (dithuramboi) and dirges (threnoi).
These show the breadth of his genius; the height of it we must estimate by the
one group of his poems which we have entire, the Songs of Victory (epinikia or
epinikoi), composed to celebrate the successful contestants in the great national
games of Greece, Olympian (Olumpionikai, sc. humnoi), Pythian (Puthionikai), Nemean
(Nemeonikai), Isthmian (Isthmionikai). In these poems, which were delivered by
trained choruses, the poet is the spokesman, and this is an important point for
the appreciation of the often intensely personal tone of the lyric chorus as compared
with the chorus of the drama. A victory at one of the great games was a matter
of joy and pride not only to the victor himself and to his kindred, but also to
the community, so that there is a peculiar blending of the private with the public,
of intimate allusion with wide scope. The elements are many: festal joy, wise
and thoughtful counsel, the uplifting of the heart in prayer for prince and for
people, the inspiration of a fervent patriotism; but the victory is the dominant
theme, and that victory is raised to the high level of the eternal prevalence
of the beautiful and the good over the foul and the base; the victor is transfigured
into a glorious personification of his race, and the present is reflected, magnified,
illuminated in the mirror of the mythic past. The epinician becomes the triumphal
song of Hellenism and the triumphal song of idealized humanity. To understand
this it is necessary to understand also the deep religious and ethical and artistic
meaning of the great games of Greece, of which the Olympian Games were the crown;
so that whatever else a man might achieve or suffer, an Olympian victory was sunshine
for life. "To spend and to toil"--this is the motto of him who would
attain; a motto that means self-sacrifice, submission to authority, devotion to
the public weal; and this motto is incarnate in the Pindaric Heracles, who is
held up as the type of achievement and endurance in obedience to the divine will.
Heracles is the Doric ideal, and Pindar his last prophet. Pindar still lives in
the world of the old gods, still believes in the array of their shining forms,
and if he rejects a myth that dishonours god, his faith is intact, the priestly
temper conquers. Life was a serious thing to him. The melancholy strain that is
not absent from Homer, that dominates Hesiod, makes itself heard in Pindar. We
hear over and over again of the shortness and the sorrowfulness of human life,
the transitoriness of its pleasures, our utter dependence upon the will of an
envious god. And yet it is not a melancholy that degenerates into doleful brooding.
It is ‘a spur that the clear spirit doth raise’ to noble action. But for noble
action noble blood is necessary. Pindar is an aristocrat, and to him the blood
of the gods is the true channel of the grace of the gods. Government fitly reposes
only in the hands of those who are endowed by nature for the work of the ruler,
and what is true of government is true also of art. Art is divine, and the eagle,
the bird of Zeus, is its chosen symbol. Ineffectual chatter is all that can be
expected of crows and daws. But the divine right of government, the divine right
of genius, is not absolute, and is to be exercised only in obedience to divine
law. Native endowment being god-given involves the duty of self-restraint, which
is imposed by the giver. And this "measure," which is the summary of
Pindaric ethics, brings with it the recompense of reward in that other world which
Pindar sees and makes us see with a startling sense of reality.
Pindar was claimed by the ancient rhetoricians as an exemplar
of the "austere" style, as belonging to the same order as Aeschylus
in tragedy, as Thucydides in history. His style is the grand style, but grand
after the antique pattern of grandeur, which combines weight and fulness of meaning
with artistic exactness in every detail. The copiousness of Pindar is a commonplace,
but the subtle art of Pindar is often overlooked in the earlier characterizations
of his poetry, and it is safe to follow the poet himself, who bears ample witness
to his own excellences. Opulence, elevation, force, cunning workmanship, vigorous
execution--these are all claimed by the poet for himself; and his splendour, his
loftiness, his wealth of imagery, his forceful concentration, his varied metaphor,
his vivid narrative, his superb diction must be recognized at once, though the
admiration of these characteristics is indefinitely enhanced by closer study.
But what withdraws itself from the reader is the sequence of thought, the planfulness
of the epinician, and yet this is a point which Pindar also insists on. This planfulness,
though disregarded or denied by literary people ancient and modern, has been diligently
sought after by the best commentators and by the most thoughtful students of Pindar,
and while no consensus has been reached, much has been done to show sequence and
balance, to reproduce the architectonic principle, to bring out the relations
of the myth which forms the heart of every ode to the rest of the organism, to
trace the thread of the thought and to make audible the burden of the song as
revealed by the recurrence of significant words and significant sentiments. Despite
much straining and much overinterpretation, Pindar is much nearer to us than he
was ever before. The music and the dance are lost without which the full significance
of a Pindaric ode cannot be appreciated, but the rhythm remains, and under the
guidance of the rhythm we can penetrate into many of the recesses of Pindaric
songs.
The great Pindaric MSS. are, according to Mommsen's notation,
A (Ambrosianus A), twelfth century; B (Vaticanus B), also of the twelfth century;
C (Parisinus G), belongs to the close of the twelfth century); D (Mediceus B)
in the Laurentian Library at Florence, thirteenth or fourteenth century. The inferior
MSS. are called Thomani, Moschopulei, Tricliniani, as they represent the editions
of Thomas Magister, Moschopulos, and Triclinius. A good reading in them is a lucky
accident.
The older scholia to Pindar go back to Didymus as Didymus goes
back to an earlier time, and they have a certain value for the constitution of
the text; the later scholia have very little value of any kind. A critical edition
was begun by E. Abel with Nemeans and Isthmians in 1884.
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Nov 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
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