Infancy to adulthood

Pindar was born circa 518 BC (the 65th Olympiad) in Cynoscephalae, a village in Boeotia, not far from Thebes. His father's name is variously given as Daiphantus, Pagondas or Scopelinus, and his mother's name was Cleodice.^[11] It is told that he was stung on the mouth by a bee in his youth and this was the reason he became a poet of honey-like verses (an identical fate has been ascribed to other poets of the archaic period). Pindar was about twenty years old in 498 BC when he was commissioned by the ruling family in Thessaly to compose his first victory ode (Pythian 10). He studied the art of lyric poetry in Athens, where his tutor was Lasos of Hermione, and he is also said to have received some helpful criticism from Corinna.

The early-to-middle years of Pindar's career coincided with the Greco-Persian Wars during the reigns of Darius and Xerxes. This period included the first Persian invasion of Greece, which ending at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, and second Persian invasion of Greece (480-479 BC).^[23][24] During the second invasion, when Pindar was almost forty years old, Thebes was occupied by Xerxes' general, Mardonius, who with many Theban aristocrats subsequently perished at the Battle of Plataea. It is possible that Pindar spent much of this time at Aegina. His choice of residence during the earlier invasion in 490 BC is not known, but he was able to attend the Pythian Games for that year, where he first met the Sicilian prince, Thrasybulus, nephew of Theron of Acragas. Thrasybulus had driven the winning chariot and he and Pindar were to form a lasting friendship, paving the way for his subsequent visit to Sicily.

Middle age

Enthroned Pindar with lyre, Muse and poetess. Antique fresco in Pompeii

Pindar seems to have used his odes to advance his, and his friends', personal interests.^[25] In 462 BC he composed two odes in honour of Arcesilas, king of Cyrene, (Pythians 4 and 5), pleading for the return from exile of a friend, Demophilus. In the latter ode Pindar proudly mentions his own ancestry, which he shared with the king, as an Aegeid or descendant of Aegeus, the legendary king of Athens. The clan was influential in many parts of the Greek world, having intermarried with ruling families in Thebes, in Lacedaemonia, and in cities that claimed Lacedaemonian descent, such as Cyrene and Thera. The historian Herodotus considered the clan important enough to deserve mention (Histories IV.147). Membership of this clan possibly contributed to Pindar's success as a poet, and it informed his political views, which are marked by a conservative preference for oligarchic governments of the Doric kind.

Pindar might not actually claim to be an Aegeid since his 'I' statements do not necessarily refer to himself. The Aegeid clan did however have a branch in Thebes, and his reference to 'my ancestors' in Pythian 5 could have been spoken on behalf of both Arcesilas and himself – he may have used this ambivalence to establish a personal link with his patrons.^[26]

He was possibly the Theban proxenos or consul for Aegina and/or Molossia, as indicated in another of his odes, Nemean 7,^{[27][28][29][30]} in which he glorifies Neoptolemus, a national hero of Aegina and Molossia. According to tradition, Neoptolemus died disgracefully in a fight with priests at the temple in Delphi over their share of some sacrificial meat. Pindar diplomatically glosses over this and concludes mysteriously with an earnest protestation of innocence – "But shall my heart never admit that I with words none can redeem dishonoured Neoptolemus". Possibly he was responding to anger among Aeginetans and/or Molossians over his portrayal of Neoptolemus in an earlier poem, Paean 6, which had been commissioned by the priests at Delphi and which depicted the hero's death in traditional terms, as divine retribution for his crimes.

Some doubt this biographical interpretation of Nemean 7 since it is largely based on marginal comments by scholiasts and Pindaric scholiasts are often unreliable. The fact that Pindar gave different versions of the myth may simply reflect the needs of different genres, and does not necessarily indicate a personal dilemma.^[31] Nemean 7 in fact is the most controversial and obscure of Pindar's victory odes, and scholars ancient and modern have been ingenious and imaginative in their attempts to explain it, so far with no agreed success.^[32]

In his first Pythian ode, composed in 470 BC in honour of the Sicilian tyrant Hieron, Pindar celebrated a series of victories by Greeks against foreign invaders: Athenian and Spartan-led victories against Persia at Salamis and Plataea, and victories by the western Greeks led by Theron of Acragas and Hieron against the Carthaginians and Etruscans at the battles of Himera and Cumae. Such celebrations were not appreciated by his fellow Thebans: they had sided with the Persians and had incurred many losses and privations as a result of their defeat. His praise of Athens with such epithets as bulwark of Hellas (fragment 76) and city of noble name and sunlit splendour (Nemean 5) induced the authorities in Thebes to fine him 5,000 drachmae, to which the Athenians are said to have responded with a gift of 10,000 drachmae. According to another account,^[33] the Athenians even made him their proxenus or consul in Thebes. His association with the fabulously rich Hieron was another source of annoyance at home. It was probably in response to Theban sensitivities over this issue that he denounced the rule of tyrants (i.e. rulers like Hieron) in an ode composed shortly after a visit to Hieron's sumptuous court in 476–75 BC (Pythian 11).^[34]

Pindar's actual phrasing in Pythian 11 was "I deplore the lot of tyrants" and though this was traditionally interpreted as an apology for his dealings with Sicilian tyrants like Hieron, an alternative date for the ode has led some scholars to conclude that it was in fact a covert reference to the tyrannical behaviour of the Athenians, although this interpretation is ruled out if we accept the earlier note about covert references. According to yet another interpretation Pindar is simply delivering a formulaic warning to the successful athlete to avoid hubris.^[17] It is highly unlikely that Pindar ever acted for Athenians as their proxenus or consul in Thebes.^[35]

Lyric verse was conventionally accompanied by music and dance, and Pindar himself wrote the music and choreographed the dances for his victory odes. Sometimes he trained the performers at his home in Thebes, and sometimes he trained them at the venue where they performed. Commissions took him to all parts of the Greek world – to the Panhellenic festivals in mainland Greece (Olympia, Delphi, Corinth and Nemea), westwards to Sicily, eastwards to the seaboard of Asia Minor, north to Macedonia and Abdera (Paean 2) and south to Cyrene on the African coast. Other poets at the same venues vied with him for the favours of patrons. His poetry sometimes reflects this rivalry. For example, Olympian 2 and Pythian 2, composed in honour of the Sicilian tyrants Theron and Hieron following his visit to their courts in 476–75 BC, refer respectively to ravens and an ape, apparently signifying rivals who were engaged in a campaign of smears against him – possibly the poets Simonides and his nephew Bacchylides.^[36] Pindar's original treatment of narrative myth, often relating events in reverse chronological order, is said to have been a favourite target for criticism.^[37] Simonides was known to charge high fees for his work and Pindar is said to have alluded to this in Isthmian 2, where he refers to the Muse as "a hireling journeyman". He appeared in many poetry competitions and was defeated five times by his compatriot, the poet Corinna, in revenge of which he called her Boeotian sow in one of his odes (Olympian 6. 89f.).

It was assumed by ancient sources that Pindar's odes were performed by a chorus, but this has been challenged by some modern scholars, who argue that the odes were in fact performed solo.^[38] It is not known how commissions were arranged, nor if the poet travelled widely: even when poems include statements like "I have come" it is not certain that this was meant literally.^[39] Uncomplimentary references to Bacchylides and Simonides were found by scholiasts but there is no reason to accept their interpretation of the odes.^[40] In fact, some scholars have interpreted the allusions to fees in Isthmian 2 as a request by Pindar for payment of fees owed to himself.^[41] His defeats by Corinna were probably invented by ancient commentators to account for the Boeotian sow remark, a phrase moreover that was completely misunderstood by scholiasts, since Pindar was scoffing at a reputation that all Boeotians had for stupidity.^[42]

Old age and death

His fame as a poet drew Pindar into Greek politics. Athens, the most important city in Greece throughout his poetic career, was a rival of his home city, Thebes, and also of the island state Aegina, whose leading citizens commissioned about a quarter of his Victory Odes. There is no open condemnation of the Athenians in any of his poems but criticism is implied. For example, the victory ode mentioned above (Pythian 8) describes the downfall of the giants Porphyrion and Typhon and this might be Pindar's way of covertly celebrating a recent defeat of Athens by Thebes at the Battle of Coronea (447 BC).^[43] The poem ends with a prayer for Aegina's freedom, long threatened by Athenian ambitions.

Covert criticism of Athens (traditionally located in odes such as Pythian 8, Nemean 8 and Isthmian 7) is now dismissed as highly unlikely, even by scholars who allow some biographical and historical interpretations of the poems.^[44]

One of his last odes (Pythian 8) indicates that he lived near a shrine to the oracle Alcmaeon and that he stored some of his wealth there. In the same ode he says that he had recently received a prophecy from Alcmaeon during a journey to Delphi ("...he met me and proved the skills of prophecy that all his race inherit")^[45] but he does not reveal what the long-dead prophet said to him nor in what form he appeared.^{[nb 2]} The ode was written to commemorate a victory by an athlete from Aegina.

Pindar doesn't necessarily mean himself when he uses the first person singular. Many of his 'I' statements are generic, indicating somebody engaged in the role of a singer i.e. a 'bardic' I. Other 'I' statements articulate values typical of the audience, and some are spoken on behalf of the subjects celebrated in the poems.^[46] The 'I' that received the prophecy in Pythian 8 therefore might have been the athlete from Aegina, not Pindar. In that case the prophecy must have been about his performance at the Pythian Games, and the property stored at the shrine was just a votive offering.^[47]

Nothing is recorded about Pindar's wife and son except their names, Megacleia and Daiphantus.^[48]

About ten days before he died, the goddess Persephone appeared to him and complained that she was the only divinity to whom he had never composed a hymn. She said he would come to her soon and compose one then.

Pindar lived to about eighty years of age. He died around 438 BC while attending a festival at Argos. His ashes were taken back home to Thebes by his musically gifted daughters, Eumetis and Protomache.

Post mortem

One of Pindar's female relatives claimed that he dictated some verses to her in honour of Persephone after he had been dead for several days. Some of Pindar's verses were inscribed in letters of gold on a temple wall in Lindos, Rhodes. At Delphi, where he had been elected a priest of Apollo, the priests exhibited an iron chair on which he used to sit during the festival of the Theoxenia. Every night, while closing the temple doors, they intoned: "Let Pindar the poet go unto the supper of the gods!"

Pindar's house in Thebes became one of the city's landmarks. When Alexander the Great demolished Thebes in 335 BC, as punishment for its resistance to Macedonian expansionism, he ordered the house be left intact out of gratitude for verses praising his ancestor, Alexander I of Macedon.^[49]

Style

Pindar's poetic style is very distinctive, even when the peculiarities of the genre are set aside. The odes typically feature a grand and arresting opening, often with an architectural metaphor or a resounding invocation to a place or goddess. He makes rich use of decorative language and florid compound adjectives.^[107] Sentences are compressed to the point of obscurity, unusual words and periphrases give the language an esoteric quality, and transitions in meaning often seem erratic, the images seem to burst out – it is a style that sometimes baffles but also makes his poetry vivid and unforgettable.^[108]

Pindar's power does not lie in the pedigrees of ... athletes ... It lies in a splendour of phrase and imagery that suggests the gold and purple of a sunset sky. – F. L. Lucas^[109]

He has that force of imagination which can bring clear-cut and dramatic figures of gods and heroes into vivid relief...he has that peculiar and inimitable splendour of style which, though sometimes aided by magnificent novelties of diction, is not dependent on them, but can work magical effects with simple words; he has also, at frequent moments, a marvellous swiftness, alike in the succession of images, and in the transitions from thought to thought; and his tone is that of a prophet who can speak with a voice as of Delphi. – Richard Claverhouse Jebb^[89]

His odes were animated by...

one burning glow which darted out a shower of brilliant images, leapt in a white-hot spark across gaps unbridgeable by thought, passed through a commonplace leaving it luminous and transparent, melted a group of heterogeneous ideas into a shortlived unity and, as suddenly as a flame, died. – Gilbert Highet^[110]

Some of these qualities can be found, for example, in this stanza from Pythian 2, composed in honour of Hieron:

The stanza begins with a celebration of divine power, and then abruptly shifts to a darker, more allusive train of thought, featuring condemnation of a renowned poet, Archilochus, Grown fat on the harsh words of hate. Archilochus was an iambic poet, working within a genre that licensed abusive and scurrilous verse – a regrettable tendency from the viewpoint of Pindar, whose own persona is intensely earnest, preaching to Hieron the need for moderation (wealth with wisdom) and submission to the divine will. The reference to the embittered poet appears to be Pindar's meditative response to some intrigues at Hieron's court, possibly by his rivals, condemned elsewhere as a pair of ravens (Olympian 2). The intensity of the stanza suggests that it is the culmination and climax of the poem. In fact, the stanza occupies the middle of Pythian 2 and the intensity is sustained throughout the poem from beginning to end. It is the sustained intensity of his poetry that Quintilian refers to above as a rolling flood of eloquence and Horace below refers to as the uncontrollable momentum of a river that has burst its banks. Longinus likens him to a vast fire^[113] and Athenaeus refers to him as the great-voiced Pindar.^[114]

Pindar's treatment of myth is another unique aspect of his style, often involving variations on the traditional stories,^[115] since his original audience was familiar with the myths and this allowed him to concentrate on unique and surprising effects. Reversing the chronological order was one such effect, as in Olympian VII dedicated to Diagoras of Rhodes, but this could also resemble a circular pattern, beginning with a culminating event, followed by scenes leading up to it, and ending with its restatement, as in his account of the Dioscuri in Nemean 10.^[116] Myths enabled him to develop the themes and lessons that pre-occupy him – in particular mankind's exulted relation with the gods via heroic ancestors and, in contrast, the limitations and uncertainties of human existence – but sometimes the traditional stories were an embarrassment and were carefully edited, as for example: "Be still my tongue: here profits not / to tell the whole truth with clear face unveiled," (Nemean 5, epode 1); "Away, away this story! / Let no such tale fall from my lips! / For to insult the gods is a fool's wisdom," (Olympian 9, strophe 2); "Senseless, I hold it, for a man to say / the gods eat mortal flesh. / I spurn the thought," (Olympian 1, epode 2).^[117] His mythical accounts are edited for dramatic and graphic effects, usually unfolding through a few grand gestures against a background of large, often symbolic elements such as sea, sky, darkness, fire or mountain.^[107]

Structure

Pindar's odes typically begin with an invocation to a god or the Muses, followed by praise of the victor and often of his family, ancestors and home-town. Then follows a narrated myth, usually occupying the central and longest section of the poem, which exemplify a moral, while aligning the poet and his audience with the world of gods and heroes.^[118] The ode usually ends in more eulogies, for example of trainers (if the victor is a boy), and of relatives who have won past events, as well as with prayers or expressions of hope for future success.^[119] The event where the victory was gained is never described in detail, but there is often some mention of the hard work needed to bring the victory about.

A lot of modern criticism tries to find hidden structure or some unifying principle within the odes. 19th century criticism favoured 'gnomic unity' i.e. that each ode is bound together by the kind of moralizing or philosophic vision typical of archaic Gnomic poetry. Later critics sought unity in the way certain words or images are repeated and developed within a particular ode. For others, the odes are just celebrations of men and their communities, in which the elements such as myths, piety, and ethics are stock themes that the poet introduces without much real thought. Some conclude that the requirement for unity is too modern to have informed Pindar's ancient approach to a traditional craft.^[91]

The great majority of the odes are triadic in structure – i.e., stanzas are grouped together in three's as a lyrical unit. Each triad comprises two stanzas identical in length and meter (called 'strophe' and 'antistrophe') and a third stanza (called an 'epode'), differing in length and meter but rounding off the lyrical movement in some way. The shortest odes comprise a single triad, the largest (Pythian 4) comprises thirteen triads. Seven of the odes however are monostrophic (i.e., each stanza in the ode is identical in length and meter). The monostrophic odes seem to have been composed for victory marches or processions, whereas the triadic odes appear suited to choral dances.^[119] Pindar's metrical rhythms are nothing like the simple, repetitive rhythms familiar to readers of English verse – typically the rhythm of any given line recurs infrequently (for example, only once every ten, fifteen or twenty lines). This adds to the aura of complexity that surrounds Pindar's work. In terms of meter, the odes fall roughly into two categories – about half are in dactylo-epitrites (a meter found for example in the works of Stesichorus, Simonides and Bacchylides) and the other half are in Aeolic metres based on iambs and choriambs.^[91]

Chronological order

Modern editors (e.g., Snell and Maehler in their Teubner edition), have assigned dates, securely or tentatively, to Pindar's victory odes, based on ancient sources and other grounds. The date of an athletic victory is not always the date of composition but often serves merely as a terminus post quem. Many dates are based on comments by ancient sources who had access to published lists of victors, such as the Olympic list compiled by Hippias of Elis, and lists of Pythian victors made by Aristotle and Callisthenes. There were however no such lists for the Isthmian and Nemean Games^[120] – Pausanias (6.13.8) complained that the Corinthians and Argives never kept proper records. The resulting uncertainty is reflected in the chronology below, with question marks clustered around Nemean and Isthmian entries, and yet it still represents a fairly clear general timeline of Pindar's career as an epinician poet. The code M denotes monostrophic odes (odes in which all stanzas are metrically identical) and the rest are triadic (i.e. featuring strophes, antistrophes, epodes):