Pindar was the great lyric poet of ancient greece, who is believed to have lived between 518 to438 B.C .He gained frame for his poems that celebrate triumphs in various Hellenic athletic games.His poems are notted for their complexity, rich metaphors, and intensely emotional language.In fact ,Pindars name will ,forever ,be connected with the Isthmian, Pythian,Nemean, and Olympic games.The2004 Olympic medals presented on one side the eternal flame,framed by a verse by Pindar,along with the logo of the Athens games
His claim to our remembrance and study rests on many grounds. He was the most famous and popular lyric poet of his day, and is the only Greek lyric poet of whose works any considerable portion remains. He possessed an extraordinary wealth of language and of imagery, which often renders his poems complicated and difficult to understand. He illustrates the glories of the victors by allusions to the exploits and traditions of their ancestors and their cities in every age, so that his works are a mine of reference to the mythologist and chronicler of ancient Greece. Plutarch alone has ninety quotations from Pindar. But the extant poems are, perhaps, more interesting from the picture they give us of the place of importance which the athletic contests at Olympia, Nemea, and the Isthmus held in the minds of the Greeks. Victory here conferred an honour with which no other distinction could compare.
The spirit of Pindar's poetry is Panhellenic. This is, indeed, a part of its essence. At Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, Corinth, Greeks of all cities were brought into sympathy by rites and beliefs common to all. Pindar is highly skilled in the treatment of local myths or cults, appropriate to the particular victory. But a sure instinct ever prompts him to link these interests of the individual city with topics which appeal to the religious sense or ancestral pride of the whole Hellenic name. The triumph which had owed its opportunity to the conception of a national unity could not be worthily commemorated in song which that conception had not helped to inspire. Pindar's age was one in which a really great poet could scarcely fail to be in accord with the quickened sense of Hellenic kinship. The years 502 to 452 B.C. measure the limits of his extant work; his happiest activity falls in the period just before and after the invasion of Greece by Xerxes. A great danger had drawn the members of the Hellenic family closer together; a great deliverance had left them animated by the recent memory of deeds which seemed to attest the legends of Agamemnon and Achilles; warmed by a more vivid faith in those gods who had indeed been with them in the hour of trial; comforted by a new stability of freedom; cheered by a sense of Hellenic energies which could expand securely from the Pillars of Hercules to the Phasis, from the Nile to the furthest point that man may reach on the way to the Hyperboreans; exalted in thought and fancy by the longing to body forth all this joy and hope in the most beautiful forms which language and music, marble, ivory, and gold could furnish for the honour of the gods, and for the delight of men who were their seed through the heroes. Aeschylus, in his Persae, heralds as with a clarion-note the advent of this age: Pindar, in his Odes of Victory, expresses some of its most brilliant and most suggestive aspects.
Every great Hellenic artist of the fifth century B.C. was vitally affected by his own relation to the common life of the city and of Hellas. If it could be shown that Pindar, a loyal Theban, was a disloyal Greek, then we might well marvel if that profound discord with the very soul of Greek art did not utter itself in some jarring notes which even a modern ear could not fail to catch. A great scholar has said:—"Such a man as Pindar could take no part in the enthusiasm of the Wars of Liberation, and could shortly after the battle of Marathon sing the glories of an Athenian without giving one word to that great day."[2] The reference is to Pythian vii., of 22 lines only, for Megacles the Alcmaeonid, who won the four-horse-chariot race at Delphi in 490 B.C. Granting—what is not certain—that this slight ode was written after the battle, the absence of allusion to it would be sufficiently explained by the fact that such an allusion would have been singularly infelicitous. Athenian gossip accused the Alcmaeonidae of having signalled from Athens to the Persians, by raising a bright shield, immediately after the battle[3]. Turn to other odes, and we shall see how entirely Pindar rejoiced in the great national victory. Salamis, he says, is the glory of the Athenians, Plataea of the Spartans[4]—those fights "whereby the Medes with curved bows were overthrown." "Some god has turned aside from us the stone that hung over our heads, as over Tantalus,—a torment greater than Hellas could bear[5]. But now the fear hath gone by, and eased me from sore anguish." Still, indeed, there is grief in his heart (καίπερ ἀχνύμενος θυμόν); since Thebes, the native city which he loved so well, had no part in the glory. Elsewhere his feeling on this point comes out clearly, and in a way which is not without pathos. "In which of the fair deeds of yore done in thy land, immortal Thebe, didst thou take most delight?" When thou broughtest forth Dionysos with the flowing locks, who sits beside Demeter; when Zeus came to Alcmene's bed; when Teiresias had fame for prophecy, and Iolaos for the driving of chariots? "But the grace of the old time sleeps, and men forget it, save what hath been wedded to the glorious tide of song, and hath won the perfect meed of minstrel's skill." The greatness of Thebes, Pindar felt, belonged to the past, not to the present. As he exults in the deliverance of Greece Proper from the Persians, so he celebrates the nearly simultaneous deliverance of Sicilian and Italian Greece from the Carthaginians, by that victory of Hiero at Cumae which "drew Hellas out of heavy servitude[6]."
Though his poetry has no immediate concern with politics, we can, I think, discern the outlines of his own political creed. His family belonged to a noble house of ancient renown in Greece,—the Aegeidae, who traced their descent from the "Cadmean" stock of prehistoric Thebes[7]. Before the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus, while the lands beneath Taygetus on the eastern side were still possessed by the Achaean masters of Amyclae, the Aegeidae had settled among them, as well as some Minyans from Lemnos. After the Dorian conquest the Aegeidae, though of Cadmean descent, appear to have been adopted by the Spartans into one of the three Dorian tribes[8]; and hence Pindar can say,—"fame tells that from Sparta comes the fair glory of our house; thence sprang the Aegeidae, my sires, who went to Thera" (Pyth. V. 68). Elsewhere he alludes to the still earlier chapter in the story of the family, when they, sons of Thebes (σέθεν ἔκγονοι), "took Amyclae, by the oracles of Delphi" (Isthm. vi. 14). The Aegeidae had a branch at Cyrene as well as at Thera, Sparta, and Thebes. Pindar speaks of the Theban Aegeidae as "showing honour at the banquet" to Cyrene, when they keep the festival of the Carneia—a festival which, though in historical times associated with Dorians and especially with Sparta, had been originally brought from Thebes to Amyclae by the Cadmean Aegeidae, and had been of old associated with the worship of Demeter rather than with that of Apollo. Thus connected, by a lineage of which he was evidently proud, both with Cadmean Thebes and with Dorian Sparta, Pindar was not likely to have much personal sympathy with any advanced phase of democracy. The government of Thebes at the time of the Persian wars had been, in the phrase of Thucydides, a δυναστεία οὐ μετὰ νόμων,—an oligarchy of a narrow and non-constitutional type; this had been replaced, after the repulse of the Persian invasion, by an ὀλιγαρχία ἰσόμονος (Thuc. iii. 62). The latter phrase well expresses, as I conceive, the shade of Greek political life most congenial to Pindar. See the suggestive passage in Pythian xi. (478 B.C.) 53: τῶν γὰρ ἀνὰ πόλιν εὑρίσκων τὰ μέσα μάσσονι σὺν | ὄλβῳ τεθαλότα, μέμφομ' αἶσαν τυαννίδων· | ξυναῖσιδ' ἀμφ' ἀρεταῖς τέταμαι, κ.τ.λ.: "in polities I find the middle state crowned with more enduring good; therefore praise I not the despot's portion; those virtues move my zeal which serve the folk." One in whom pride of ancestry fostered a reverence for the traditions of Dorian civil life could have as little liking for absolutism as for the rule of the mob; and that Pindar felt such reverence is well seen in the passage which speaks of Hiero as having founded Aetna (the restored Catana) Ὑλλίδος στάθμας ἐν νόμος, in the laws of the Hyllic rule: "yea," adds the poet, "and the Dorian sons of Pamphylus and of the Heracleidae, dwelling under the cliffs of Taygetus, are ever content to abide by the ordinances of Aegimius" (Pyth. i. 63)[9]. When Pindar speaks of the royal lot supremely happy and glorious (τὸ δ' ἔσχατον κορυφοῦται βασιλεῦσι, Ol. i. 113), this does not involve approval of the τυραννίς as a form of government. He is speaking with reference to victory in the great festivals; the four-horse-chariot race, the contest which contributed most to the splendour of such festivals, was possible only for very rich men; and τύραννοι, such as Hiero, commanded the amplest means of achieving such victories with impressive magnificence. Pindar's picture of the estimable τύραννοσ is one who is "gentle to the folk, not envious of the noble, and to strangers a father wondrous kind":—a character which, if realised, would have gone far to strip the Greek τύραννισ of its distinctive vices[10].
On the other hand, there is only one touch in Pindar's extant work which can be said to reflect unfavourably on democracy,—his remark that the man of honest tongue has the advantage under every form of rule,—παρὰ τυραννίδι, χὡπόταν ὁ λάβος στρατός, χὤταν πόλιν οἱ σοφοὶ τηρέωντι[11]. By οἱ σοφοί are meant "the few"—the houses in whom the ancient sacred rituals are hereditary,—the depositaries of ancient civil wisdom and law. Now it is worthy of notice that this occurs in an ode written for Hiero of Syracuse, and that in Pindar's time (if he died, as seems likely, about 441 B.C.) neither Greece Proper nor the Hellenic East yet presented any phase of democracy which could be intelligibly indicated as the rule of "the raging crowd." Clearly, I think, he is referring—in phrase which Siceliots could well appreciate—to those violent democratic revolutions which more than once convulsed Sicilian cities, and overthrew tyrannies, in the earlier part of the fifth century. There is no reason to doubt the warmth or the sincerity of the admiration which Pindar felt for the type of stable and reasonable democracy—for the Athens of Themistocles and Pericles. "Fairest of preludes is the renown of Athens for the mighty race of the Alcmaeonidae[12]...What home, or what house, could I call mine by a name that should sound more glorious for Hellas to hear?" κλειναί, μεγάλαι, εὐώνυμοι, λιπαραί, ἰοστέφανοι, ἱεραί—such are the epithets which Pindar elsewhere bestows on Athens; but most interesting of all, perhaps, is the reference in Nemean v., where, speaking of Menander[13], the Athenian trainer of an Aeginetan victor, he says,—χρὴ δ' ἀπ' Ἀθανᾶν τέκτον' ἀθληταῖσιν ἔμμεν: "meet it is that a shaper of athletes should come from Athens." Those who know Pindar's style, and who remember his frequent comparison of the poet's efforts to the athlete's, will scarcely doubt that, when he wrote those words, he was thinking of the early days when his own young powers had been disciplined at Athens by Lasus of Hermione.
Apart from his sympathies with any particular polity, or his relations to any one city, there is a larger and grander aspect of Pindar's poetry in regard to the politics of Hellas. The epic poets had sung the glories of war. Pindar celebrates the rivalries of peace. Aegina—which claims a larger number of his odes than any other one city—was a great seat of commerce: he describes it as a "heaven-set pillar for strangers of every clime[14], wherein Saving Themis hath worship by the side of Zeus the god of the stranger." Corinth, "vestibule of the Isthmian Poseidon," is a city "wherein dwelleth Eunomia, and her sister, the upholder of cities, and unfailing Dicè, and like-minded Eirenè, watchers over wealth for men, golden daughters of wise-counselling Themis[15]" At Opus, again, there is a home for "Themis and her daughter, glorious Eunomia, who saveth[16]." Tranquillity is the friend of cities (Ἁσυχία φιλόπολις); and Tranquillity is the daughter of Justice[17]. We can often feel in Pindar that new sense of leisure for peaceful pursuits and civilising arts which came after the Persian Wars; there breathes in his poetry such a message of sacred peace as the Olympic festival itself proclaimed every year to Hellas by "the heralds of the seasons, the Elean truce-bringers of Zeus son of Cronus[18]"—κάρυκες ὡρᾶν,...σπονδοφόροι Κρονίδα Ζηνὸς Ἀλεῖοι.
Pindar's attitude towards religion is that of a man who held devoutly the received national creed of Greece, but with whose faith were blended certain elements distinguishing it from that of the ordinary citizen of the more cultivated sort. Here, again, we must remember his connection with the Aegeidae. In such houses certain family rites and bodies of sacred lore were usually hereditary. These, combined with political influence, often gave such families peculiarly intimate relations with the chief centres of worship and divination, such as the temples at Delos, Abae, and, above all, Delphi. The direct influence of the great houses on the oracles can be constantly recognised in Greek history. Pindar was, besides, a man of lofty genius, and of that typically Greek temperament in which the sense of natural beauty rose to be a sense of awe as in presence of a divine majesty; as when Plato says of the soul that had looked upon the true loveliness, σεφθεῖσα δὲ ἀνέπεσεω ὑπτία. Such a man was as perfect a teller-forth of the honour of the gods, as truly a heaven-born προφήτης, as the temple of Delphi could have found for its service and the more we study Pindar's poetry, the more we shall read in it the mind of that Delphic religion which, in his time, was still a mighty, if a declining, power. I may illustrate my meaning by a particular trait. Pindar frequently refers to the art of divination as one by which skilled seers win unerring signs from the gods; more especially he renders homage to the great augural clan of the lamidae, whose practice of the μαντικὴ δι' ἐμπύρων on the altar of Zeus entitles Olympia to be emphatically styled δέσποιν' ἀλαθείας, Mistress of Truth[19]. At other times, again, he declares with equal emphasis that no forecast of the future is possible. "Never yet has any mortal man won from the gods a sure token (σύμβολον πιστόν) of an event to come, but forecasts of the future have been doomed to blindness"; τῶν δὲ μελλόντων τετύφλωνται φραδαί[20]. Again: "the sign from Zeus attends not on men with clearness[21]." If Pindar had been asked to explain the apparent contradiction, the answer would probably have been that, when the gods give omens which they intend men to understand, these omens are infallible; but that often such divine tokens are altogether withheld; and that in many instances, when some sign is vouchsafed, but not of a clear kind,—as if to try the spiritual insight of men,—men interpret such a sign amiss. Such a view of divination would have been just such as it was the policy of an oracular priesthood to propagate. Those who worked the machinery of the great oracles were concerned to hold the balance between the doctrine that there is a sacred science of divination, that the gods do inspire their chosen ministers, and the plain lesson of experience, that inferences drawn from oracles or omens were often fallacious[22] Pindar well represents the priestly attitude on the question, with this difference, that his external position exempts him from all suspicion of conscious imposture.
Reverence for the divine power is a strongly marked and ever-present characteristic of his work: everything must be ascribed to the gods as its author; "from the gods are all means of human excellence"; "it is the god who gives every accomplishment to men's hopes; the god can overtake the winged eagle; he is swifter than the dolphin in the sea; he bends the necks of the haughty; he gives to others a glory that never grows old[23]." Pindar's reluctance to relate aught that is unseemly concerning the gods appears in touches that, at a first glance, might remind us of Plato, or even of Euhemerus: yet his feeling as to the mythical theology seems to be essentially different from that of either. A typical case is his treatment of the story that, when the gods dined with Tantalus, they ate the flesh of his son Pelops. Pindar will not represent the gods as cannibals (γαστριμάργους): he prefers to believe that Poseidon, enamoured of Pelops, carried him away, like Ganymede, to Olympus; then the envious neighbours of Tantalus invented the story that Pelops had been devoured. The supposed conduct of the neighbours is, in itself, a touch of Euhemerism, it is introduced, however, not to eliminate the marvellous, but merely to help the substitution of one marvel for another. On the other hand, the poet is not concerned for the moral effect of the myth on those who hear it; in this respect his own version is no improvement; it is the dignity and decorum of the gods—as he conceives these—which he is anxious to vindicate. In other words, his rejection of scandalising myths springs from an instinct of religious reverence; it is not based on moral grounds; it is an earnest expression of the Greek repugnance to δυσφημία, or, in his own phrase, of the ἀδινον δάκος κακαγοριᾶν, in regard to the highest beings whom he can imagine. "It is seemly (ἐοικός) to speak fair things of deities." "To revile the gods is a hateful work of poet's skill[24]."
§ 7. I referred above to certain further elements which are blended in Pindar with the popular form of the Hellenic faith. The chief of these is a mystic doctrine of the soul's destiny after it has left the body. After death, the guilty soul pays penalty for all sins committed "in this realm of Zeus"; there is a judge who tries them, "pronouncing sentence ἐχθρᾷ ἀνάγκᾳ, by a dread necessity," under a law which puts inexorable constraint upon his compassion[25]. "Those who have had the courage to be steadfast thrice in this world, and thrice in the world of spirits, and to keep their souls utterly from wrong, ascend by the path of Zeus to the tower of Cronus; there the breezes of Ocean breathe around the Islands of the Blest; and flowers of gold are bright, some on the fair trees of that land, and some in the waters, with chains and wreaths whereof they twine their hands, by the righteous decrees of Rhadamanthys[26]." The ἐς τρὶς ἑκατέρωθι μείναντες brings before us the mystical doctrine of the myth in the Phaedrus. Here we see that Pindar was at least familiar with the idea of metempsychosis; how far he was a disciple of Pythagoreanism is less certain. Another passage has been taken to imply the Pythagorean doctrine of a relative ethical mean; another, a Pythagorean division of virtue as fourfold—temperance, courage, justice, prudence[27] The impression which such utterances of Pindar leave on the mind is that he was acquainted with the teaching of Mysteries, especially, perhaps, the Orphic; that he held this doctrine as an esoteric supplement to the popular religion, harmonising them in some way which satisfied his own religious sense; but that his speculations had not taken any shape so clear or definite as to deserve the name of a philosophy. A contradiction has sometimes been felt between those passages in which he anticipates a fully conscious existence for the soul after death, determined by the moral character of the earthly life, and other passages in which he might seem rather to echo the popular language in regard to Hades, as peopled by shadows whose being is "the lowest degree of existence above annihilation"; such a being as the Homeric Achilles conceives:—ἦ ῥά ἔστι καὶ εἰν Ἀΐδαο δόμοισιν | ψυχὴ καὶ εἴδωλον, ἀτὰρ φρένες οὐκ ἔνι πάμπαν[28] On a closer examination, the supposed contradiction seems to me to depend on the sense which we are to attach to a phrase in Pyth. v. 90f., where he is speaking of "holy kings who have passed to Hades" (λαχόντες Ἀΐδαν):—ἀκούοντί που χθονίᾳ φρενὶ | σφὸν ὄλβον υἱῷ τε κοινὰν χάριν: "they hear, I ween, with the mind of the nether world, their own good fortune and the fame which their son shares with them." If χθονίᾳ φρενί meant, "with such imperfect consciousness as the dead possess," then Pindar would be speaking like the Homeric Achilles. But surely this would be a strained and arbitrary construction. It is more in accord with Pindar's manner to regard χθονίᾳ as conveying a shadowy suggestion that the intelligence which belongs to the unseen world is of a different order from the intelligence of the living.
The elastic word ἀρετή, as used by Pindar, covers all excellence, physical, moral, and mental: though, as might have been expected, his most frequent use of the word relates to "prowess," especially at the festivals. One of Pindar's dominant thoughts is that φυή, native temperament—the direct gift of the gods—is the grand source of ἀρετή[29], and that training is of comparatively slight power. The similarity of phrase might lead us to regard Pindar's depreciation of διδακταὶ ἀρεταί[30] as a forerunner of the famous οὐ διδακτὸν ἀρετή,—the paradoxical formula by which Plato expressed that "virtue is not brought to a man, but must be drawn out of him." There is not, however, much connection between the two sentiments which happen to have clothed themselves in like words. The ἀρετή which Pindar has in view is mainly that of the victorious athlete, to whom physical gifts are essential; and of the poet, who is "born, not made." He has, further, the belief—fostered by his own pride of Aegid descent—that the qualities of a good stock are hereditary. Thus he speaks of "an upright mind derived from noble sires" (πατέρων ὀρθαὶ φρένες ἐξ ἀγαθῶν)[31]. But his belief in heredity is duly guarded. "The virtues of old time repeat their strength at intervals (ἀμειβόμεναι) in the generations of men; even as the black soil of the tilth yields not fruit continually, and as trees will not bear a fragrant bloom of like richness with every returning year: even thus doth Fate lead on the mortal race[32]." Destiny—Πότμος ἄναξ (Nem. iv. 42)—appears with Pindar under a more benignant aspect than with his contemporary Aeschylus. For Pindar, it is rather the supreme Intelligence—the concentrated embodiment of a divine Providence—than that relentless Aeschylean "Necessity" of which the ministers are "the threefold Fates and the mindful Furies." The maxims of conduct and the moral reflections which are strewn through Pindar's poetry express the peculiarly Greek feelings about life in an earnest and sometimes beautiful form. "One race is there of men, one race of gods; and from one mother (Earth) we both have our being; but in our power are we wholly separate; for the race of men is naught; but the brazen heaven abides, a dwelling-place steadfast for ever. Yet withal we have some likeness to the Immortals, perchance in lofty mind, perchance in form; though we know not what line Fate hath marked for the goal of our course, whether in the day-time or in the watches of the night[33]." "Verily the hopes of men are oft tossed up and down, as they cleave the waves of vain deceit....Many things fall out for men beyond their reckoning, sometimes adverse to joy; but sometimes they who had encountered the billows of woe have suddenly changed that trouble for bliss abounding[34]." Time alone can show whether a seeming ill is not a blessing in disguise[35]; and Time is the only sure vindicator of truth[36]. In the very spirit of the sacred festivals, their poet says, διάπειρα βροτῶν ἔλεγχος, trial against their fellows is the test of men[37]. The first incentive to honourable effort is "Shame, daughter of Forethought,"—a provident desire for the good opinion of the good[38]. A further incentive is the noble desire of victory, χάρμα, "the light of life[39]." And the highest worth of victory is not in the momentary triumph, but in that lasting renown which the poet can confer. "The word lives longer than the deeds,"—ῥῆμα δ' ἐργμάτων χρονιώτερον βιοτεύει[40]. The elements of "sane happiness" (ὑγίεις ὄλβος)—such as has least reason to dread the jealousy of the gods—are, substance sufficing for daily wants, and a good name among men (εὐλογία). He who has these must not "seek to be a god." To a few is given the best lot that man can attain,—πλοῦτος ἀρεταῖς δεδαιδαλμένος, wealth set with virtues—as gold with gems more precious still. This is "a star exceeding brilliant, the truest light for man"; and it is so because it "bringeth opportunity for various deeds[41]." It would be a view very unfair to Pindar which interpreted this as mere worship of wealth. We have here the characteristically Greek conception that man's highest happiness is to be found in the unimpeded development and active exercise of all faculties, bodily and spiritual. Pindar's praise of wealth rests ultimately on the same basis as Aristotle's requirement that one should be "adequately equipped with the external goods"—adequately, that is, for free and complete self-development. The other side is given in Pindar's own phrase: "this, they say, is the sorest pain—that one who hath sense of noble things should perforce turn his feet away from them[42]." The Theban poet quotes this as a well-known saying. Thebes was the scene of that banquet in 479 B.C. at which, as Herodotus relates, the Persian exclaimed to his fellow-guest, "This is the most cruel pang that man can bear—to have much insight, but power over nothing[43]." May not Pindar have been thinking of the same story, which had become a proverb for his native city?
Pindar could not be one of the self-effacing poets. The conditions of his art, in those lofty hymns which celebrate victories consecrated by religion, demanded that he should come forward as the inspired envoy of the gods. If he magnifies his office, it is because the part which he fills is not only that of the minstrel; it is also closely allied to the function of the priest and of the seer (μάντις). We are always on dangerous ground in seeking illustrations for Greek things from non- Hellenic sources; but, with due reservations, it would not be improper to suggest an analogy between the didactic element in Pindar and the same element in Hebrew Prophecy. The personal character of Pindar is more surely indicated by the spirit of his work than by particular sentiments which occur in it; these γνῶμαι are of the Delphian prophet rather than of the man. We note that, while the sense of beauty which possesses his mind is normally Greek, as finding its full satisfaction in human splendour of every kind, it differs from the ordinary Greek type in a deeper sympathy with external nature. He delights in the season when, after dark winter, "the chamber of the Hours is opened, and delicate plants perceive the fragrant spring" (frag. 45—where οἰχθέντος Ὡρᾶν θαλάμου recalls the modern Greek ἄνοιξις): he compares joy following sorrow to the bursting of the vernal earth into bloom (Pyth. iv. 64, Isthm. iii. 36). When Iamus prays to Apollo beneath the clear night sky (νυκτὸς ὑπαίθριος, Ol. vi. 61); when Jason, about to sail with the Argonauts, invokes "the rushing strength of waves and winds, and the nights, and the paths of the deep" (Pyth. iv. 194),—the Greek words are chosen with a magic which seems to place us under the stars or on the waters of the South. Both Aeschylus and Pindar speak of Etna in volcanic eruption. But Aeschylus—thoroughly Greek in this—fixes our thought on the scathe done to man's labour: "rivers of fire shall burst forth, rending with fierce fangs the level meads of fruitful Sicily." Pindar gives a picture of natural grandeur and terror: when Etna, "pillar of the sky, nurse of keen snow all the year," from secret depths hurls forth "pure springs of fire unapproachable; and in the daytime those rivers pour out a stream of lurid smoke; but in the darkness a red rolling flame bears rocks with a roar to the wide deep" (Pyth. i. 20). The lines on the eclipse of the sun (frag. 74) are sublime. But it is not the moral sublimity of Aeschylus. Pindar never rises into the sphere of titanic battle between destiny and will. He is always of the earth, even when he is among the gods. For him, past and present are linked by the descent of men, through the heroes, from the gods; he is always thinking of the present in relation either to the heroic past, or to some change which the gods may have in store for the near future. His ethics are not subtle or original, but frankly express the common creed of "good men" in his time: φίλον εἴν φιλεῖν· ποτὶ δ' ἐχθρὸν ἅτ' ἐχθρὸς ἐὼν λύκοιο δίκαν ὑποθεύσομαι, | ἄλλ' ἄλλοτε πατέων σκολιαῖς ὁδοῖς (Pyth. ii. 83): "Friendship for friend: foe will I thwart as foe, wolf-like, with changeful course in crooked paths." An ingenious interpretation of the context would make this a sentiment condemned by Pindar. But it seems to be merely the common Greek maxim of his age, that all is fair in war. Compare Isthm. iii. 65, where he praises a man for being in courage a lion, in craft a fox (μῆτιν δ' ἀλώπηξ), with the comment,—χρὴ δὲ πᾶν ἔρδοντα μαυρῶσαι τὸν ἐχθρόν, "'tis well to worst a foe by any deed." Compare the utterances of Menelaus in the Ajax (1132f.), and of Creon in the Antigone (522).
Pindar has much of the old epic tone, and cleaves to the old epic view of the poet as the inspired minstrel. On the other hand, he frequently evinces the sense that poetry has become an art with elaborate technical methods, and that the exercise of this art is a profession. In the Iliad, it will be remembered, ἀοιδοί appear only as the hired chanters of laments for the dead (xxiv. 720)—that is, if we except the passage (Il. xviii. 604), not found in any MS. of the Iliad, and almost certainly an interpolation, where the ἀοιδός plays for the dancers on the Shield of Achilles. In the Odyssey, the ἀοιδός is already a semi-professional character; the epithet δημιοεργός can be applied to him as well as to the soothsayer, the physician, the herald, the carpenter; though he is still surrounded by the reverence felt for a recipient of direct inspiration. His presence restrains Aegisthus from meditated crime; nor does Aegisthus dare to shed his blood. With Pindar we have come, of course, to the age of professional rhapsodes, who bear the branch of laurel (ῥάβδος): Isthm. iii. 55:—Ὅμηρος...πᾶσαν ὀρθώσαις ἀρετὰν κατὰ ῥάβδον ἔφρασεν | θεσπεσίων ἐπέων λοιποῖς ἀθύρειν: "Homer hath done right to all the prowess (of Ajax), and hath made it a theme for men after-born, by the wand of his lays divine"—where {{{1}}}, the branch being the symbol of the tradition. So Nem. ii. 1, the rhapsodes—Ὁμηρίδαι ῥαπτῶν ἐπέων ἀοιδοί—begin "with a prelude to Zeus" (Διὸς ἐκ προοιμίον). The so-called Homeric Hymns are such προοίμια, intended for the use of rhapsodes, and the latest of them are probably as late as Pindar's youth. Pindar's own affinity with the Homeric spirit is seen not merely in echoes of Homeric language (as Ol. vi. 17, ἀμφότερον, μάντιν τ' ἀγαθὸν καὶ δουρὶ μάρνασθαι), but also in such touches as his tacit correction of Hesiod (Pyth. iii. 28). Hesiod (frag. 225 Goettl.) had said that a crow was the messenger who announced the infidelity of Coronis to Apollo; Pindar refers the discovery to Apollo's "all-knowing mind" (πάντα ἴσαντι νόῳ), and represents him, with Homeric vigour, as reaching the scene "at the first stride" of his immortal feet (βάματι ἐν πρώτῳ): cp. Il. xiii. 20, of Poseidon,—τρὶς μὲν ὀρέξατ' ἰών, τὸ δὲ τέτρατον ἵκετο τέκμωρ. Thoroughly Homeric, too, in spirit is Pindar's derivation of the name Aias from αἰετός, the eagle which was the omen of his birth, rather than from the plaintive αἶ αἶ to which another legend pointed: Isthm. v. 53, καί νιν ὄρνιχος φανέντος κέκλετ' ἐπώνυμον εὐρυβίαν Αἴαντα. In the same ode, 47, it may be remarked that ἄρρηκτον φυάν means "stalwart," not "invulnerable," and that, therefore, Pindar has not departed from Homeric sobriety by adopting the later tradition.
Pindar's personal sympathies are strongly knit to that heroic age in which his ancestry claimed a part, and in which his own imagination could still move with such noble freedom. All the more he feels the change which has come over the motives of poetry. "The men of old lightly sent forth shafts of song that told their loves" (οἱ πάλαι...ῥίμφα παιδείους ἐτόξευον...ὕμνους). Here he is thinking, not of Homeric epos, but of the lyric poetry which came after it,—of Alcaeus, Sappho, Ibycus, Anacreon. "For then the Muse was not yet greedy of gain, nor a hireling; and sweet songs of tender sound were not yet sold by honey-voiced Terpsichore with faces made fair by silver"—(ἀργυρωθεῖσαι πρόσωπα. "But now the Muse bids heed that word of the Argive [Aristodemus] which cleaves to the paths of truth: 'Money, money maketh man,' said he, when with loss of wealth he lost his friends" (Isthm. ii. 1—11). The sentiment in Pyth. iii. 54, ἀλλὰ κέρδει καὶ σοφία δέδεται ("but even science is in bonds to gain"), has immediate reference to Cheiron's art, yet with a side-glance at the poet's own, which is constantly denoted by σοφία. Pindar appears to regard the contemporary poet as one whose calling has been made distinctly professional by the circumstances ot his age,—by the struggle for existence, and the necessity of winning bread. On the other hand, he implicitly protests against the notion that, because it is professional, it must therefore be mercenary. The "songs with faces made fair by silver" are poems which owe their cold glitter of flattery or false sentiment to the promise of reward. Simonides was the elder contemporary of Pindar. We are reminded of the story in Aristotle's Rhetoric (iii. 2 § 14) that Simonides was once asked to write an ἐπινίκιον for a victory in the mule-car race, when, being dissatisfied with the sum offered, he declined to praise ἡμίονοι. But, the fee having been raised, he sang—χαίρετ', ἀελλοπόδων θύγατρες ἵππων. In Arist. Rhet. ii. 16 § 2, Simonides is quoted as saying to the Syracusan Hiero's wife that it is better to be πλούσιος than σοφός: and his avarice is again a subject of allusion in Arist. Eth. N. iv. 2 ad fin., as well as in Aristophanes, Pax, 697 f. This illustration of Pindar's ἀοιδὴ ἀργυρωθεῖσα πρόσωπον might be further recommended by the fact that elsewhere he uses πρόσωπον figuratively of the front or opening of a poem. In Nem. viii. 37:—χρυσὸν εὔχονται, πεδίον δ' ἕτεροι | ἀπέραντον· ἐγὼ δ' ἀστοῖς ἀδὼν καὶ χθονὶ γυῖα καλύψαιμ', | αἰνέων αἰνητά, μομφὰν δ' ἐπισπείρων ἀλιτροῖς: "Some pray for gold and some for boundless land; mine be it to have pleased my folk e'en till I lay my limbs in earth, still praising things worthy of praise, but sowing censure for evil doers." It is, I venture to think, a mistaken cynicism which would regard this utterance as conventional. Rather may we believe that one of Pindar's distinctions among contemporary poets was just the desire to raise his art, by the free and earnest exercise of original genius, above the reproach of a sordid servility,—from which, as Aristotle shows, even such a man as Simonides was not exempt. We may infer this, not merely from detached texts, but from Pindar's poetry as a whole, and from the spirit which study can discern to be the animating and dominant influence. He claims that he is independent—giving praise only where it is due. Note, as illustrating this, a well-marked trait of the Odes—Pindar's insistence on the merit of the trainer or the charioteer, even where this might somewhat detract from the lustre of the victor for whom the ode is written. Thus at Aegina, where there was a strong jealousy of Athens, he insists—though he shows his consciousness that the topic will not be popular—on doing justice to the Athenian trainer Melesias (Ol. viii. 54). He even can say that the trainer is to the victor as Achilles to Patroclus (Ol. xi. 19). He does not shrink from reproving the king of Cyrene for harshness to a kinsman, or the tyrant of Syracuse for listening to flatterers. He says of a successful boxer that he is ὀντὸς μὲν ἰδέσθαι, "mean to look upon" (Isthm. iii. 68), though συμπεσεῖν ἀκμᾷ βαρύς, "sore to meet in his strength." Pindar is not (to my thinking) deficient in tenderness; but he has too much truth of nature to be sentimental. "A son born in wedlock is dear to a father who is now moving on the path that wends away from youth; yea, it warmeth his soul with love; for when wealth is doomed to be the charge of an alien sought from without, 'tis most grievous to the dying" (Ol. xi. 86). Universally, Pindar's tone resembles nothing" less than that of a hireling encomiast or a courtly flatterer. Even towards the most illustrious of the victors, his attitude is invariably that of an equal, and of one who is privileged to teach, to exhort, and, if need be, to rebuke. We shall readily understand this if we remember the value, for his own day in Greece, of his threefold claim—Aegid descent, intimate relation with the worship of Apollo, and poetical genius.
The task proposed to Pindar by those forms of poetry which he cultivated may be described in his own words. It was—φόρμιγγά τε ποικιλόγαρυν καὶ βοὰν αὐλῶν ἐπέων τε θέσιν | συμμίξαι πρεπόντως: "meetly to blend the cithern's various voice, and the sounding flutes, and verses set thereto" (Ol. iii. 8). And so the teacher of the chorus, whose duty was to superintend the choral rehearsals of an ode, is called γλυκὺς κρατὴρ ἀγαφθέγκτων ἀοιδᾶν (Ol. vi. 91), one who "sweetly tempers resounding strains"; who sees that the flutes do not overpower the cithern, or either the words, but that the several elements are blended in a harmonious whole. Compare Ol. xiv. 17, Λυδίῳ γὰρ Ἀσώπιχον ἐν τρόπῳ | ἔν τε μελέταις ἀείδων ἔμολον: "I have come [to Orchomenus], hymning Asopichus in Lydian mood, by voices of ripe skill"; literally, "in the Lydian mood, and by aid of practisings": where ἐν Λυδίῳ τρόπῳ refers to the poet's composition, and ἐν μελέταις to the rehearsals of the chorus. This point is missed by translating μελέταις simply "strains"—a sense to which it surely cannot be reduced. We have some glimpses of the long technical development through which, before Pindar's day, Greek lyric poetry had passed; as in the reference to the improvement of the dithyramb (Ol. xiii. 18); to the πολυκέφαλος νόμος said to have been invented by Olympus or Crates (κεφαλᾶν πολλᾶν νόμον, Pyth. xii. 23); to the ὕμνου τεθμὸς Ὀλυμπιονίκας (Ol. vii. 88); and in the contrast between the καλλίνικος ὁ τριπλόος,—the so-called "song of Archilochus," with the refrain τήνελλα καλλίνικε—and a more elaborate ode in praise of a victor (Ol. ix. i). Pindar's art demanded laborious studies in metre, in music, and in the adaptation of both to ὀρχηστική—the highly intricate systems of the choral dance. Tradition gives him several instructors—Scopelinus, Agathocles or Apollodorus, Lâsus of Hermione—not to mention the criticisms of Corinna. Good teaching, he says, can give a keener edge to native power (θήξαις κε φύντ' ἀρετᾷ, Ol. xi. 20). But, wherever he alludes to the poet's craft, he dwells on the distinction between acquired skill and the inborn gift. Ol. ii. 86:—σοφὸς ὁ πολλὰ εἰδὼς φυᾷ· ματόντες δὲ λάβροι | παγγλωσσίᾳ, κόρακες ὥς, ἄκραντα γαρύετον | Διὸς πρὸς ὄρνιχα θεῖον: "The bard is he whose mind is rich by nature's gift; men shaped by lore have sound and fury effecting nought; 'tis the chattering of crows against the godlike bird of Zeus." Ol. ix. 100:—τὸ δὲ φυᾷ κράτιστον ἅπαν· πολλοὶ δὲ διδακταῖς | ἀνθρώπων ἀρεταῖς κλέος | ὤρουσαν ἀρέσθαι | ἄνευ δὲ θεοῦ σεσιγαμένον | οὐ σκαιότερον χρῆμ' ἕκαστον· ἐντὶ γὰρ ἄλλαι | ὁδῶν ὁδοὶ περαίτεραι, | μία δ' οὐχ ἅπαντας ἄμμε θρέψει | μελέτα· σοφίαι μὲν | αἰπειναί: "Nature's gift is alway best; but many men have strained to win renown by feats whereto they had been schooled. Yet, where the god is not, a truer instinct ever counsels silence; paths are there beyond paths; one training will not form us all; the heights of art are steep." Nem. iii. 40:—συγγενεῖ δέ τις εὐδοξίᾳ μέγα βρίθει· | ὅς δὲ διδάκτ' ἔχει, ψεφηνὸς ἀνὴρ | ἄλλοτ' ἄλλα πνέων οὔποτ' ἀτρεκέϊ | κατέβα ποδί, μυριᾶν δ' ἀρετᾶν ἀτελεῖ | νόῳ γεύεται. "Born with him is the power that makes a man's name great; but whoso hath the fruits of lore alone, he walks in a vain shadow; his spirit veers with every breeze; he never plants a sure foot in the lists; he dallies with ambitions numberless, but his mind achieves not one."
The third Nemean cannot be dated; but another of the odes just quoted, the second Olympian (for Thero of Acragas) is of 476 B.C.; and in the second Pythian—of 477 B.C.—occurs the well-known passage in which Pindar warns Hiero of Syracuse against flatterers,—adding that those who seek to snatch an unfair start (στάθμας...ἑλκόμενοι περισσᾶς, v. 90) sometimes overreach themselves. It can scarcely be doubted that the emphatic contrast of poetical φυὴ and μάθησις has some personal reference. But I cannot believe that Simonides is the person intended. His avarice is probably (as suggested above) an object of Pindar's allusion elsewhere; but, so far as we can now judge, the work of Simonides bore a stamp so distinctive that it would have been unmeaning to speak of him as devoid of native faculty. In 476 B.C., however, Bacchylides, the nephew of Simonides, was still a young poet; about that time—the year is doubtful—he had written on a victory won at Olympia by a horse of Hiero's called Pherenicus—which (or a namesake) is mentioned in Pindar's first Olympian ode (472 B.C.); and he was probably rising into notice at the courts of the Sicilian princes, where the established fame of Simonides would afford a favourable introduction. Now, one of the fragments of Bacchylides (Bergk, no. 17) runs:—ἕτερος ἐξ ἑτέρου σοφὸς τό πάλαι τό τε νῦν· | οὐδὲ γὰρ ῥᾷστον ἀρρήτων ἐπέων πύλας | ἐξευρεῖν: "bard follows bard [i.e. poet teaches poet by example]: for 'tis no light quest to find the gates of unattempted song" [to devise a thoroughly original strain]; where ἀρρήτων means,—not "unspeakable" (like Milton's "inexpressive" song),—but "unspoken," unsung before: cp. Soph. Antig. 556, ἀλλ' οὐκ ἐπ' ἀρρήτοις γε τοῖς ἐμοῖς λόγοις. This is the sentiment of one who viewed lyric poetry as a traditional art—as, indeed it was, and an art of elaborate method—without any strong consciousness of original genius. Nay, we should do no force to the words if we read in them an implied tribute from the nephew to the uncle who had been his master and his model. When Pindar depreciates the singer who is a mere pupil of others; when he says that "one training will not form us all," or lift the uninspired man to the heights of poetry; may he not be hinting that the young Bacchylides—a new competitor for Sicilian laurels—was only a feeble echo of Simonides? In an ode written for Hiero in 474 B.C. Pindar expresses the hope of "surpassing rivals" (ἀμεύσασθ' ἀντίους, Pyth. i. 45): he touches on the baneful power of envy and slander,—but adds, "yet forego not noble aims; 'tis better to be envied than pitied" (κρέσσων γὰρ οἰκτιρμοῦ φθόνος, ib. 85). The tone of this and other passages is (to my mind) not that of a jealous man, but of one who is maintaining an attitude of defence against calumny; and it is difficult to resist the impression that, at this time, Pindar had been the object of some hostile intrigue at Hiero's court, which he associated with the desire of Simonides to advance the fortunes of a young kinsman more distinguished by diligence than by originality.
