Pindar

Pindar was one of the great lyric poets of ancient Greece. He was born around 518 BC in Cynoscephalae, a village in Boeotia near Thebes, and wrote in Greek during the transition from the Archaic age to the Classical period. Of the nine canonical lyric poets of that tradition, his work is the best preserved. He matters above all because he was the first Greek poet to reflect on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet himself.

Little about his life can be established with certainty. The five ancient sources that record it are late, and only one, a short biography found on an Egyptian papyrus from at least the second century AD, survives on a document relatively close to his own time. The others are much later compilations, mixed with fanciful material. For that reason, many scholars look to his own odes, especially those written for victors, which refer to events that can be dated. He probably came from an aristocratic family, though it is unclear whether he claimed descent from the Aegeid clan, which had ties to Athens and a branch in Thebes. According to a legend, bees built a honeycomb in his mouth as a child, which was supposed to explain his honeyed verse; similar stories were told about other archaic poets.

He was trained in Thebes and in Athens, where he is said to have studied with Lasos of Hermione. As a very young man he is reported to have lost a poetry contest to the poet Corinna of Tanagra, who supposedly advised him to sow with full hands rather than with full sacks, that is, to aim for abundance but with judgment. His earliest surviving ode, Pythian 10, was composed around 498 BC for a family in Thessaly, when Pindar was still young. His reputation grew quickly, and he travelled through the aristocratic courts of Greece and the western Greek world, from Cyrene to Syracuse, where he visited the court of the tyrant Hieron. His commissions were closely tied to personal and family interests, and several odes ask for favours on behalf of friends and patrons.

The Persian Wars made his political position unpopular. Thebes had sided with the Persians, and Pindar took a conciliatory line towards the invader, which set him against the poet Bacchylides, who favoured a united Greek resistance. According to the most widely repeated account, his praise of Athens and his ties to Hieron led the Thebans to fine him five thousand drachmas, a sum that the Athenians reportedly answered with a larger gift. He died in Argos, around 438 BC according to the tradition that the sources preserve, although the dates given by different authors vary.

His surviving work consists of four books of epinician odes, forty-five in all, along with scattered fragments. Epinicians were choral songs composed to celebrate victors at the four great Panhellenic festivals, and they were sung as the champion was escorted home. Pindar used the athletic victory as a starting point for praising the personal worth of the athlete and the virtues of his family and city. He also wrote hymns, paeans, maiden songs, laments and drinking songs. His style is demanding: he moves abruptly from one subject to another, makes surprising connections, and uses a solemn language that mixes dialects and is dense with imagery. Even in antiquity his obscurity was noticed, and writers from Herodotus to Voltaire found his poetry hard to understand. Yet Quintilian ranked him the greatest of the lyric poets, and in modern times Goethe and Hölderlin made him a symbol of the free creative genius.

His legacy is twofold. He established the model of the victory ode, which later poets imitated for centuries, and his name gave us the adjective Pindaric, used for a lofty, freely soaring style. His reflections on the poet as the interpreter of his community's values also anticipated a concern that runs through much of later Western literature.