Pindar

Greek lyric poet

• Born: c. 518 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Cynoscephalae, near Thebes, Boeotia, Greece
• Died: c. 438 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Argos, Greece

As the greatest lyrical poet of classical times, Pindar influenced literature, music, and culture for centuries.

Early Life

Pindar (PIHN-dehr), the greatest of ancient Greek lyric poets, was born in Cynoscephalae, near Thebes, around 518 b.c.e. A city rich in history and legend, Thebes was located in the region known as Boeotia, north of the Gulf of Corinth. Pindar came from a noble Dorian family whose lineage went back to ancient times and included heroes whom he celebrated in his poems. His uncle was a famous flute player; Pindar, who excelled at that instrument, may have acquired his skills from him. Lyric poems were written primarily for solo or choral singing, with instrumental accompaniment, and Pindar learned his craft in writing poetry from two important lyric poets, Lasus of Hermione and Corinna of Tanagra. It is said (but disputed by some) that Corinna defeated Pindar five times in lyric competition.

In the framing of his poetry, Pindar drew from the vast store of myths—many of them associated with Thebes—that he had learned in his youth. To him, the Olympians and other figures from ancient stories were not mythical but real. He accepted reverently, for example, the stories of the oracle of Delphi, and he devoutly worshiped Zeus (even composing a famous hymn to him) and other gods and goddesses all his life. He was also the heir to several priestly offices, which buttressed his natural inclination toward religion. In addition to being educated near Thebes, he is said to have received instruction in Athens, which was a great academic and cultural center. Studying in Athens would account for his having known the Alcmaeonids, a politically active family in Athens for which he wrote laudatory poems—probably, as was customary, under commission.

Pindar was schooled in history, philosophy, religion, music, and literature. His poetry is filled with allusions to those fields as well as to his homeland and relatives. He secured his reputation as a young man, and fabulous legends grew up around him. For example, one story explaining his talent claimed that as he slept out in the fields one day, bees had deposited honey on his lips.

Pindar received a constant flow of engagements to write poems for important figures, including the victors of athletic contests, the odes for which are the only surviving works of the poet. Usually these victory odes, the Epinikia (498-446 b.c.e.; Odes, 1656) were performed in processionals welcoming the heroes home. Pindar’s odes are named for the particular games at which they were performed—the Olympian Odes, Pythian Odes, Nemean Odes, and Isthmian Odes. This celebratory tradition was at one with the Greek belief that great deeds—including the greatest of all, the creation of the world—should be artistically remembered so as not to pass into oblivion. For a time, Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, was a patron of Pindar and of other poets, such as Simonides, Bacchylides, and the great tragedian Aeschylus. This activity helped Syracuse to rival Athens and Thebes as an intellectual center and helped perpetuate Pindar’s already considerable fame.

Life’s Work

In the Alexandrian list of the nine best lyric poets, Pindar’s name came first. In his own time and in later centuries he was remembered as “soaring Pindar.” The fact of music is inseparable from the fact of lyric poetry in Pindar, for it is clear that his poems were written to be sung. What is not known is how to reproduce for modern performance the melody and the meter of his lyrics, all of which were written in celebration of an individual or an event, often an athletic victory. This is to speak only of the four books that have survived, for there are fragments of his other works (or allusions to them) that prove that his genius was not limited to the choral lyric. He produced thirteen books in genres other than the epinikia, including hymns, processionals, and dirges.

Another obstacle to the comprehension of Pindar’s poetry is its allusiveness. Those people hearing the performance of a victory ode had an immediate awareness of Pindar’s allusions, whether to the Olympians, the heroes of myth, the rulers of the times, the athletes or families being honored, or even autobiographical references. Only one who has read widely in Greek history, philosophy, literature, and legend can begin to understand these allusions or the stirring effect they would have had on Pindar’s audience.

The poems are, then, locked into a time frame in their references and in their constructions. The themes, however, are accessible. A central theme in Pindar is the emulation of divinity. Humans are of the same race with gods but lack their powers; thus they are ever striving toward perfection, in an effort to be as much like the gods as possible. This view required the poet to overlook or disbelieve scandalous stories in mythology (which, to Pindar, was religion) that belied the perfection of the gods. Remembrance of the greatness of Zeus—Zeus unsullied by rumors about his lust, his violence, his unreasonableness—gave humanity a standard by which to live. Life is the thing of a day—another theme in Pindar—and to live it with constant reverence for the lessons taught by gods and heroes was to give reverence to oneself and to give a degree of permanence to life.

Virtue, bravery, manliness, and competitive physical activities were far more important to Pindar than was (as with Homer) intelligence, and he expressed scorn toward those who displaced these attributes with intellectual measures. The intelligent, resourceful Odysseus, for example, he found less praiseworthy than a man of physical prowess. Physical things—bodily strength and athletic skills and other things of the earth—were the things of heaven. Acquired learning paled beside innate talent, inborn greatness of soul and body.

Pindar always wrote his odes as if those they celebrated were joined with the immortals. Poets were said to have Zeus speaking through them; subjects celebrated by odes were, similarly, raised above the ordinary lot of humankind. There was a mystical link between the human being and divinity, a link that could not, to Pindar’s way of thinking, be achieved by education. A basic belief of the aristocracy that Pindar represented was that qualities of goodness—humanistic ideals—could not be taught; universal edification being impossible, therefore, society depended on an aristocracy that was morally and spiritually enlightened. Pindar’s place as a poet was to praise heroes in order to raise humankind.

Rooted in tradition as he was, Pindar was conservative; still, he was an innovator and a searcher. He was always seeking profound meanings from human events, ideals and nobility from everyday realities. He supported the rule of Eunomia (law, or good constitution) as a way for a moderate aristocracy to succeed tyranny. Such an aristocracy would be made up not only of those from the traditional aristocracy but also of those from the wealthy class. Those with leisure to contemplate new possibilities for humanity would most likely be those who would bring about new achievements for the betterment of humanity; the wealthy, the aristocratic, had freer minds. Large audiences listened to Pindar, audiences accustomed to hearing Homeric epics recited and therefore prepared for the exceptionally long, whirling passages of Pindar sung by an enthusiastic chorus.

Pindar’s fame was even greater after his death than in his own time. His writings proved not to be locked in time; rather, they were one more link of many links in Greek literature going back to a time even before Homer, and extending through Aeschylus to Plato, which, while glorifying aristocratic tradition, pointed the way to the political principle that came to be known as democracy. The highest virtue that elitism had, in other words, was the knowledge that what was available at first to only the privileged few was ultimately accessible to all. Pindar’s poetry was one of the main avenues making accessible this Greek ideal: that the commonest individuals have within them resources of divine inspiration, divine identity, divine glory.

Significance

Pindar’s complex style as preserved in the epinikia challenged later generations of poets to compose “Pindaric odes,” in which colorful images shifted rapidly and imaginatively, like rushing water. Although the content of Pindar’s surviving works is obscure for the modern reader, his inspired style remains a model of purely beautiful language.

Bibliography

Carne-Ross, D. S. Pindar. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. A brief work addressed to the general reader, with a short but useful bibliography.

Crotty, Kevin. Song and Action: The Victory Odes of Pindar. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Devoted to individual examinations of the performances of the odes for which Pindar is most remembered. Includes notes, bibliography, and index.

Finley, Moses I. The Ancient Greeks. New York: Penguin, 1991. Gives brief but interesting and useful information on Simonides, Bacchylides, and Pindar.

Grant, Mary A. Folktale and Hero-Tale Motifs in the Odes of Pindar. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1967. Straightforward account of the subject, with an index of motifs and an index of mythological characters.

Hamilton, Edith. The Greek Way. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. An excellent short book on the Greek way of life; devotes a chapter to Pindar. Bridges scholarship and general readership. Includes seven pages of references, especially to works of ancient Greek writers.

Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. The best work available on the Greco-Roman influences on Western literature. Lengthy discussion—perhaps the most accessible anywhere for general readers—on Pindar’s poetical forms and on his direct influences on poetry. Extensive notes in lieu of a comprehensive bibliography.

Pindar. Pindar. Edited and translated by William H. Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Translation of all the surviving odes. Contains a preface on Pindar and his poetry.

Race, William H. Pindar. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Comprehensive in biography, criticism, and bibliography. For both scholarly and general audiences.