Array Anacreon - Yale Required Reading - Collected Works (Vol. 1)

The earliest poem we possess (Pyth. x.) , written when Pindar was twenty -- or possibly twenty-four -- was a commission from the Aleuadæ, the princes of Pharsâlus, in Thessaly. This looks as if his reputation was made with astonishing rapidity. Soon afterwards we find him writing for the great nobles of Ægîna, patrons after his own heart, merchant princes of the highest Dorian ancestry. Then begins a career of pan-Hellenic celebrity: he is the guest of the great families of Rhodes, Tenedos, Corinth, Athens; of the great kings, Alexander of Macedon, Arkesilâus of Cyrene, Thêro of Acragas, and Hiero of Syracuse. It is as distinguished as that of Simônides, though perhaps less sincerely international. Pindar in his heart liked to write for 'the real nobility,' the descendants of Æacus and Heracles; his Sicilian kings are exceptions, but who could criticise a friendly king's claim to gentility? This ancient Dorian blood is evidently at the root of Pindar's view of life; even the way he asserts his equality with his patrons shows it. Simônides posed as the great man of letters. Pindar sometimes boasts of his genius, but leaves the impression of thinking more of his ancestry. In another thing he is unlike Simônides. Pindar was the chosen vessel of the priesthood in general, a votary of Rhea and Pan, and, above all, of the Dorian Apollo. He expounded the rehabilitation of traditional religion, which radiated from Delphi. He himself had special privileges at Delphi during his life, and his ghost afterwards was invited yearly to dine with the god. The priests of Zeus Ammon in the desert had a poem of his written in golden letters on their shrine.

These facts explain, as far as it needs explanation, the great flaw in Pindar's life. He lived through the Persian War; he saw the beginning of the great period of Greek enlightenment and progress. In both crises he stood, the unreasoning servant of sacerdotal tradition and racial prejudice, on the side of Bœotia and Delphi. One might have hoped that when Thebes joined the Persian, this poet, the friend of statesmen and kings in many countries, the student from Athens, would have protested. On the contrary, though afterwards when the war was won he could write Nemean iv. and the Dithyramb for Athens, in the crisis itself he made what Polybius calls (iv. 31) "a most shameful and injurious refusal": he wrote a poem of which two large dreamy lines are preserved, talking of peace and neutrality! It is typical of the man. Often in thinking over the best pieces of Pindar -- the majestic organ-playing, the grave strong magic of language, the lightning-flashes of halfrevealed mystery -- one wonders why this man is not counted the greatest poet that ever lived, why he has not done more, mattered more. The answer perhaps is that he was a poet and nothing else. He thought in music; he loved to live among great and beautiful images -- Heracles, Achilles, Perseus, Iâson, the daughters of Cadmus. When any part of his beloved saga repelled his moral sensitiveness, he glided away from it, careful not to express scepticism, careful also not to speak evil of a god. He loved poetry and music, especially his own. As a matter of fact, there was no poetry in the world like his, and when other people sang they jarred on him, he confesses, 'like crows.'

He loved religion, and is on the emotional side a great religious poet. The opening of Nemean vi. is characteristic; so is the end of his last dated work ( Pyth. viii.): "Things of a day! what are we and what not? A dream about a shadow is man; yet when some god-given splendour falls, a glory of light comes over him and his life is sweet. Oh, Blessed Mother Ægîna, guard thou this city in the ways of freedom, with Zeus and Prince Eacus and Peleus and good Telamon and Achilles!" -- a rich depth of emotion, and then a childlike litany of traditional saints. His religious speculations are sometimes far from fortunate, as in Olympian i.; sometimes they lead to slight improvements. For instance, the old myth said that the nymph Corônis, loved by Phoebus, was secretly false to him; but a raven saw her, and told the god. Pindar corrects this: "the god's all - seeing mind" did not need the help of the raven. It is quite in the spirit of the Delphic movement in religion, the defensive reformation from the inside. Pindar is a moralist: parenthetical preaching is his favourite form of ornament; it comes in perfunctorily, like the verbal quibbles and assonances in Shakespeare. But the essence of his morality has not advanced much beyond Hesiod; save that where Hesiod tells his peasant to work and save, Pindar exhorts his nobleman to seek for honour and be generous. His ideal is derived straight from the Dorian aristocratic tradition. You must start by being well-born and brave and strong. You must then do two things, work and spend: work with body and soul; spend time and money and force, in pursuit of ἀρετà, 'goodness.' And what is 'goodness'? The sum of the qualities of the true Dorian man, descended from the god-born, labouring, fearless, unwearied fighter against the enemies of gods and men, Heracles. It is not absolutely necessary to be rich -- there were poor Spartans; nor good-looking -- some of his prize boxers were probably the reverse. But honour and renown you must have. Eccentric commentators have even translated ἀρετà as 'success in games' -- which it implied, much as the ideal of a mediæval knight implied success in the tourney.

Pindar is not false to this ideal. The strange air of abject worldliness which he sometimes wears, comes not because his idealism forsakes him, but because he has no sense of fact. The thing he loved was real heroism. But he could not see it out of its traditional setting; and when the setting was there, his own imagination sufficed to create the heroism. He was moved by the holy splendour of Delphi and Olympia; he liked the sense of distinction and remoteness from the vulgar which hung about the court of a great prince, and he idealised the merely powerful Hiero as easily as the really gallant Chromios. Not that he is ever conscious of identifying success with merit; quite the reverse. He is deeply impressed with the power of envy and dishonest arts -- the victory of the subtle Ionian Odysseus over the true Æacid Aias. It was this principle perhaps which helped him to comprehend why Simônides had such a reputation, and why a mob of Athenian sailors, with no physique and no landed property, should make such a stir in the world.

It is a curious freak of history that has preserved us only his 'Epinîkoi' -- songs for winners in the sacred games at Olympia, Pytho, Nemea, and the Isthmus. Of all his seventeen books -- "Hymns; Pæans; Dithyrambs, 2; Prosodia, 2; Parthenia, 3; Dance-songs, 2; Encômia; Dirges; Epinikoi, 4" -- the four we possess are certainly not the four we should have chosen. Yet there is in the kind of song something that suits Pindar's genius. For one thing, it does not really matter what he writes about. Two of his sublimest poems are on mule-races. If we are little interested by the fact that Xenophon of Corinth won the Stadium and the Five Bouts at Olympia in the fifth century B.C., neither are we much affected by the drowning of young Edward King in the seventeenth A.D. Poems like Lycidas and Olympian xiii. are independent of the facts that gave rise to them. And, besides, one cannot help feeling in Pindar a genuine fondness for horses and grooms and trainers. If a horse from Kynoskephalæ ever won a local race, the boy Pindar and his fellow-villagers must have talked over the points of that horse and the proceedings of his trainer with real affection. And whether or no the poet was paid extra for the references to Melêsias the 'professional,' and to the various uncles and grandfathers of his victors, he introduces them with a great semblance of spontaneous interest. It looks as if he was one of those un-self-conscious natures who do not much differentiate their emotions: he feels a thrill at the sight of Hiero's full-dress banquet board, of a wrestling bout, or of a horse-race, just as he does at the thought of the labour and glory of Heracles; and every thrill makes him sing.