The Extant Odes of Pindar | Page 2

Pindar, though they may be
largely reduced, will always in some degree exist: we shall always wish
that he was easier to construe, that his 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