The Extant Odes of Pindar | Page 2

allusions to things unfamiliar and sometimes undiscoverable to us were less frequent, that family pride had not made it customary for him to spend so many lines on an enumeration of prizes won elsewhere and at other times by the victor of the occasion or by his kin. Such drawbacks can only fall into insignificance when eclipsed by consideration of the far more than counterbalancing attractions of the poems, of their unique and surpassing interest, poetical, historical, and moral.
Of Pindar as a poet it is hard indeed to speak adequately, and almost as hard to speak briefly, for a discussion of his poetical characteristics once begun may wander far before even a small part has been said of what might be. To say that to his poetry in supreme degree belong the qualities of force, of vividness, often of impressive weight, of a lofty style, seeming to be the expression of a like personality, of a mastery of rhythm and metre and imaginative diction, of a profoundly Hellenic spirit modified by an unmistakable individuality, above all of a certain sweep and swiftness as of the flight of an eagle's wing--to say all this would be to suggest some of the most obvious features of these triumphal odes; and each of these qualities, and many more requiring exacter delineation, might be illustrated with numberless instances which even in the faint image of a translation would furnish ample testimony[2]. But as this introduction is intended for those who purpose reading Pindar's poetry, or at any rate the present translation of it, for themselves, I will leave it to them to discover for themselves the qualities which have given Pindar his high place among poets, and will pass on to suggest briefly his claims to interest us by reason of his place in the history of human action and human thought.
We know very little of Pindar's life. He was born in or about the year B.C. 522, at the village of Kynoskephalai near Thebes. He was thus a citizen of Thebes and seems to have always had his home there. But he travelled among other states, many of which have been glorified by his art. For his praise of Athens, 'bulwark of Hellas,' the city which at Artemision 'laid the foundation of freedom,' the Thebans are said to have fined him; but the generous Athenians paid the fine, made him their Proxenos, and erected his statue at the public cost. For the magnificent Sicilian princes, Hieron of Syracuse and Theron of Akragas, not unlike the Medici in the position they held, Pindar wrote five of the longest of his extant odes, and probably visited them in Sicily. But he would not quit his home to be an ornament of their courts. When asked why he did not, like Simonides, accept the invitations of these potentates to make his home with them, he answered that he had chosen to live his own life, and not to be the property of another. He died at the age of 79, that is, probably, in the year 443, twelve years before the Peloponnesian war began. Legend said that he died in the theatre of Argos, in the arms of Theoxenos, the boy in whose honour he wrote a Skolion of which an immortal fragment remains to us. Other myths gathered round his name. It was said that once when in childhood he had fallen asleep by the way 'a bee had settled on his lips and gathered honey,' and again that 'he saw in a dream that his mouth was filled with honey and the honeycomb;' that Pan himself learnt a poem of his and rejoiced to sing it on the mountains; that finally, while he awaited an answer from the oracle of Ammon, whence he had enquired what was best for man, Persephone appeared to him in his sleep and said that she only of the gods had had no hymn from him, but that he should make her one shortly when he had come to her; and that he died within ten days of the vision.
Two several conquerors of Thebes, Pausanias of Sparta and Alexander of Macedon,
'bade spare?The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower?Went to the ground.'
At Delphi they kept with reverence his iron chair, and the priest of Apollo cried nightly as he closed the temple, 'Let Pindar the poet go in unto the supper of the god.'
Thus Pindar was contemporary with an age of Greek history which justifies the assertion of his consummate interest for the student of Hellenic life in its prime. It was impossible that a man of his genius and temperament should have lived through these times without representing to us with breadth and intensity the spirit that was in them, and there are several points in Pindar's circumstances