Pindar

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Pindar, 518?-c.438 B.C., Greek poet, generally regarded as the greatest Greek lyric poet. A Boeotian of noble birth, he lived principally at Thebes. He traveled widely, staying for some time at Athens and in Sicily at the court of Hiero I at Syracuse and also at Acragas (modern Agrigento). His chief medium was the choral lyric, and he set the standard for the triumphal ode or epinicion. Of his complete works 45 odes survive; these make one of the greatest collections of poems by a single author in Greek. His fragments are exceptionally numerous and some of them widely famous. The epinicia celebrate victories in athletic games: there are 14 Olympian odes, 12 Pythian odes, 11 Nemean odes, and 8 Isthmian odes. Each was written to be sung in a procession for the victor, usually on his return to his home city. The outstanding feature of each ode is its narrative myth, which is always connected with the winner. The myth makes appropriate the elevated moral tone and religious flavor characteristic of Pindar's poems. His style loses a great deal in translation. It has a high-flown diction and an intricate word order, dependent partly upon the complexity of his metrical requirements. Pindar wrote on commissions, but he was quite independent of any meretriciousness, because of his lofty conception of the poet's vocation.

The term Pindaric ode refers to a verse form used primarily in England in the 17th and 18th cent. The form, based on a somewhat faulty understanding of the metrical pattern used by Pindar, originated with Abraham Cowley in his Pindarique Odes (1656) and was later used by John Dryden, among others. It is characterized by irregularity in the rhyme scheme, length of the stanzas, and number of stresses in a line.

See his works (tr. by L. R. Farnell, 1930-32); his odes (tr. by R. Lattimore, 1976); studies by F. T. Nisetich (1980) and K. Crotty (1982).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 2004.
Licensed from Columbia University Press

Pindar

Pindar, Peter: see Wolcot, John.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 2004.
Licensed from Columbia University Press

Pindar

(born 518/522, Cynoscephalae—died circa 438 BC, Argos) Greek poet. A Boeotian of aristocratic birth, Pindar was educated in neighbouring Athens and lived much of his life in Thebes. Almost all his early poems have been lost, but his reputation was probably established by his later hymns in honour of the gods. He developed into the greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece, respected throughout the Greek world. Of his 17 volumes, comprising almost every genre of choral lyric, only four have survived complete, and those lack his musical settings. The extant poems, probably representing his masterpieces, are odes (see Pindaric ode) commissioned to celebrate triumphs in various Hellenic athletic games. Lofty and religious in tone, they are noted for their complexity, rich metaphors, and intensely emotive language.

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Pindar

Pindar (or Pindarus, Greek: Πίνδαρος) (probably born 522 BC in Cynoscephalae, a village in Boeotia; died 443 BC in Argos), was an Ancient Greek lyric poet.

Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, Pindar is the one whose work is by far the best preserved, and critics in antiquity tended to regard him as the greatest.

Biography

Pindar was born in Cynoscephalae, a village in Boeotia. He was the son of Daiphantus and Cleodice. Pindar was married to Megacleia. They had two daughters, Eumetis and Protomache, and a son, Daiphantus. Pindar is said to have died at Argos, at the age of seventy-nine, in 443 BC.

During the Medean wars in 490 and 480, Pindar’s personal and professional life may have been difficult. He was most likely related to individuals and groups who sided with Persia during the conflict. Thebes was occupied by Xerxes' general, Mardonius, until he was defeated and killed at the Battle of Plataea (479), along with many Theban aristocrats who had sided with Persia. However, Pindar’s career doesn't seem to have suffered much by this association. Soon after the war, his reputation spread throughout the Greek world and its colonies.

Pindar travelled throughout the Greek world to attend to his patrons. From his writings, it appears that he traveled to the court of Hiero I of Syracuse, probably in 476, at the time he wrote the first three Olympian Odes for victories of Hiero and Theron. Pindar also visited the cities of Delphi and Athens, where he may have written one or two dithyrambs to be sung at the Great Dionysiae, of which only fragments are extant. A reference in Isocrates' Antidosis (166), records Pindar's success in the city. Out of the 45 odes, 11 are written for Aeginetans, which makes it likely that he visited the powerful island of Aegina.

Pindar's house in Thebes was spared by Alexander the Great in recognition of the complimentary works he composed about and for his ancestor, king Alexander I of Macedon.

Works

Pindar is one of the most famous Greek poets, one of the few whose works are still extant in sizeable part. Pindar wrote choral works, such as Paeans and other hymns for religious festivals. Most of his writings were in honor of notable personages and victory odes in honor of winners at various games. 45 victory odes are still fully extant, grouped in four books based on the games in which the celebrated winner had competed : Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean. In addition to Hiero of Syracuse, other patrons included ITheron of Acragas, and Arcesilas of Cyrene.

The oldest extant Pindarian ode, the Tenth Pythian Ode, celebrates the victory of the Thessalian Hippocleas in the double-stadium race in 498, when the poet was only 20. However, the peak of his literary activity is generally seen as from 480 to 460. His last extant ode is probably the Eighth Pythian Ode, usually dated to 446 (when he was 72), which was written to celebrate the victory of an Aeginian wrestler, Aristomenes. Family traditions appear to have left their impression on his poetry. The clan of the Aegidae–tracing their line from the hero Aegeus–belonged to the Cadmean element of Thebes, that is, to the elder nobility who traced their descent from the days of the legendary city founder, Cadmus. Traces of these traditions in his work may also provide important information on his relationships with his contemporaries.

The Athenian comic playwright Eupolis is said to have remarked that the poems of Pindar "are already reduced to silence by the disinclination of the multitude for elegant learning" and it may be suggested that in modern times, too, Pindar is more respected than read.

Choral works

Pindar composed choral songs of several types. According to a Late Antique biographer, these works were grouped into seventeen books by scholars at the Library of Alexandria. They were, by genre:

1 book of humnoi - "hymns"
1 book of paianes - "paeans"
2 books of dithuramboi - "dithyrhambs"
2 book of prosodia - "preludes"
3 books of parthenia - "songs for maidens"
2 book of huporchemata - "songs to support dancing"
1 book of enkomia - "songs of praise"
1 book of threnoi - "laments"
4 books of epinikia - "victory odes"

Of this vast and varied corpus, only the epinikia — odes written to commemorate athletic victories — survive in complete form; the rest are known to us only by quotations in other ancient authors or from papyrus scraps unearthed in Egypt.

Pindar is to be conceived as standing within the circle of those families for whom the heroic myths were domestic records. He had a personal link with the cultural memories which everywhere were most cherished by Dorians, no less than with those which appealed to those of "Cadmean" or of Achaean stock. And the wide ramifications of the Aegidae throughout Hellas rendered it peculiarly fitting that a member of that illustrious clan should celebrate the glories of many cities in verse which was truly as panhellenic as the Olympian Games.

Pindar is said to have received lessons in aulos-playing from one Scopelinus at Thebes, and afterward, to have studied at Athens under the musicians Apollodorus (or Agathocles) and Lasus of Hermione. Several passages in Pindar's extant odes glance at the long technical development of Greek lyric poetry before his time and at the various elements of art that the lyricist was required to temper into a harmonious whole. The facts that stand out from these meagre traditions are that Pindar was precocious, meticulous, and laborious. Preparatory labour of a somewhat severe and complex kind was, indeed, indispensable for the Greek lyric poet of that age.

Chronology of his Victory Odes

The victory odes were composed for aristocratic victors in the four most prominent athletic festivals in early Classical Greece: the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean Games. Rich and allusive in style, they are packed with dense parallels among the athletic victor, his illustrious ancestors, and the myths of deities and heroes underlying the athletic festival. But "Pindar's power does not lie in the pedigrees of ... athletes, ... or the misbehavior of minor deities. It lies in a splendour of phrase and imagery that suggests the gold and purple of a sunset sky." Two of Pindar's most famous victory odes are Olympian 1 and Pythian 1.

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 (doubt is indicated by a question mark immediately following the number of an ode in the list below). The result is a fairly clear chronological outline of Pindar's career as an epinician poet: