1. General
Lyric poet (518 – c. 438 BCE), many of whose works survive and span a large numbers of genres. Pindar’s first datable poem (Pythian 10) is set at 498 BCE and his last (Pythian 8) in 446 BCE, a watershed year in Boiotian history in which collective Boiotian forces drove out occupying Athenians from the region and ushered in a more stable age of communal government in the region. His work thus represents the long transition between two major periods in Greek history, the Archaic and Classical periods, and also spans a number of landmark events and processes in Greece as a whole: the Persian Wars and the rise of the Athenian Empire.
Most of his extant poems are categorized as epinikia, poems commissioned to celebrate victors at the four major panhellenic festivals: the Olympic, the Delphic, the Nemean, and the Isthmian Games. Later Hellenistic scholars divided Pindar’s praise poetry by these venues into four books of epinikia. Also extant are fragments from other genres of Pindar’s work: partheneia (maiden-songs); hymns and other choral songs, such as dithyrambs (choral songs in honor of Dionysos) and paians (solemn choral songs for Apollo). Pindar’s fragments from these genres, although sometimes difficult to categorize, attest to the poet’s prolific production for occasions outside panhellenic victory celebrations. Given the multitude of original performance contexts for his poetry, we can conclude that Pindar performed his poetry throughout Greece for the most knowledgeable and aristocratic audiences of his lifetime.
In fact, the victors celebrated in many of Pindar’s epinikia are the leading political and aristocratic figures of the period. Many were famous tyrants of major Greek city-states, such as Hieron, leader of Syracuse, and Theron, leader of Akragas, both influential Sicilian communities. Pindar celebrated additional victors from places as varied as Aigina, Kyrene (N. Africa), Athens, Rhodes, and Thessaly. Many other notable recipients of Pindar’s praise hailed from the poet’s hometown or home region: Greek Thebes, a preeminent polis (city-state) in the middle of the region known as Boiotia. Pindar wrote a number of epinikia as well as other types of poems for celebration by his local Thebans, and some were even performed in Thebes itself.
2. Life
While most ancient biography is rightly suspect as later cultural reimagining, the canonical narrative of Pindar’s life runs as follows. Pindar is thought to have been born and/or lived most of his life in the suburb of Thebes named Kynos Kephalai, a neighborhood to the Kadmeia’s west and slight northwest. He completed poetic training in both Thebes and Athens. Because of his fame, his house became a landmark in ancient Thebes, and Arrian mentions it as being spared by Alexander the Great out of reverence upon Alexander’s destruction of the rest of Thebes (Arrian, Anabasis Alexandrou 1.9.10). Some have suggested that the poet’s property in Thebes may have been a large estate and that Pindar came from the well-to-do aristocratic Aegeid clan, referenced as his “fathers” at Pythian 5.75. Again, because these inferences come directly from Pindar’s poems or from later and unreliable accounts written about his life, one must remain skeptical as to their veracity. The truth is that we know little to nothing about Pindar’s life.
3. Works
The Ambrosian Life of the poet numbers his collected works at seventeen volumes, including separate rolls for dithyrambs, epinikia, paians, parthenia, and prosodia, among other less well-known genres (e.g., threnoi, encomia, hymns, processional poems). Such a quantity of output from such a well-known poet engendered a great deal of Hellenistic and later commentary on these works, all extant fragments of which were collected by A. Drachmann from 1903-1927. Only a few comments summarizing the major types of Pindar’s output can be offered here, after a general comment on style.
Pindar is renowned for the concomitant difficulty and beauty of his imagery, particularly in his epinikia, most likely because this genre of his work provides our longest and most numerous extant examples. Pindar is also known for abrupt movement between image, myth, and other aspects of poetry. In theme, he emphasizes many of the standard moral concepts of the archaic period: ponos (toil, labor), phthonos (jealousy), arête (excellence), among other common motifs found in lyric poetry in general. He distinguishes himself, however, by using certain catchwords for poetry (e.g., sophia) and by often extending the praise of the victor into praise of himself as a poet or of poetry in general.
3.1. Epinikia
Because more epinikia survive than any other part of Pindar’s corpus (forty-five in toto), it is easier to remark upon Pindar’s general tendencies in writing victory poems for winners at the four most-celebrated panhellenic competitions.
In his epinikia, Pindar includes gnomic statements, often short and pithy, interspersed throughout the poem as general comments on human existence, the vagaries of fortune, and other pertinent and often moralistic sentiments. At Olympian 2.33-4 and Isthmian 4.5-6, for example, Pindar notes the often changing tides of life’s course, in both instances using natural imagery of streams and winds, respectively. Many such gnomic statements are obviously meant in part to keep the victor and his family aware of their human status (e.g., one’s daimon: Isthm. 7.43) and thereby to avoid thinking too highly of their own achievements (hybris) outside of the proper measure (kairos); such acknowledgements in turn help the victor and his family avoid the envy of the gods (phthonos) and its attendant wrath (Isthm. 7.39).
Pindar juxtaposes gnomai with mythic exempla meant to stimulate the audience to consider the story and those involved in it in tandem with what Pindar mentions about the victor. Pindar is known both for making obscure choices in the myths he uses as well as for altering more canonical myths in mysterious and often inscrutable ways in these sections. His mythic exempla are thus often rather difficult to interpret: it is often best to consider them as reflections of the possibilities of the victor and his family, as opposed to mirror images of details associated with the victor or his situation. Some mythic examples are so inscrutable as to provide fodder for unending future speculation (e.g., the story of the Oresteia in Pythian 11); some are clearly reverse exempla (e.g., the myth of Bellerophon at the close of Isthmian 7).
Other aspects of these poems are not unusual, since Pindar conforms, to a certain extent, to the epinikian genre, also exemplified in the works of the poets Simonides and Bacchylides. Like these other poets, in his epinikia Pindar focuses on the glory of the achievement of the victor and the resulting praise the victor and his family will receive in the future. He highlights the family and the city from which the victor comes (e.g., Isthmian 4). He also dwells on the vagaries of human fortune, and on the hard work required, in addition to an inborn excellence, to achieve the heights of athletic victory and thus a praiseworthiness through poetry.
In the end, however, despite Pindar’s often unique treatment of myths or imagery, his epinikia fit well into lyric choral traditions that precede him, particularly in their reliance on mythic exempla used to reflect on the occasion and celebrant, as well as in their use of gnomai.
3.2. Dithyrambs
Only 50 readable lines from Pindar’s dithyrambs survive. Some very basic generalities are possible, however. Pindar’s dithyrambs, like those of other poets, such as Bacchylides, were poems commissioned by and performed in various city-states, such as Athens, often involving long descriptions of Dionysos. Certain stylistic anomalies have been noted in Pindar’s dithyrambs, such as a relatively frequent use of plural subjects with singular verbs, common mention of initiation and flowers.
3.3. Partheneia
Pindar’s partheneiai, or songs for young women, exist in short fragments, with the exception of one larger fragment (fr. 94b). According to later compilers, this piece concerns the Theban civic festival the daphnephorikon, a procession from the city to the temple of Apollo Ismenios, one of the main extramural sanctuaries to the southeast of the city. The fragment celebrates the young laurel-bearer, Agasikles, as he processes accompanied by various male relatives and a chorus of young women, to the sanctuary. Not only is this poem of utmost importance in describing a local (epichoric) religious tradition, but the poem’s style differs notably from Pindar’s victory poems in its gentle simplicity.
3.4. Paians
Songs usually performed by male choruses in honor of Apollo and in a variety of contexts, paians comprised one of the book-rolls of Pindar’s poems known to later Hellenistic commentators, now in fragmentary form. In the extant fragments Pindar predictably deals with Apollo most often, emphasizing his status as the prophetic far-shooting son of Zeus and his sanctuary at Delphi. Pindar also wrote some paians, however, for local audiences from his own region of Boiotia, his own city of Thebes, and for other communities as well. Like his encomia, in the paians Pindar uses mythology to celebrate the occasion, although he is more sparing in detail in the paians, as Rutherford suggests.
4. Scholarship
The Hellenistic scholars and poets were familiar with Pindar’s works, as were many of the Roman poets (e.g., Horace), but Pindar’s output had lapsed into obscurity by the middle ages. Pindar was rediscovered and seriously studied in Europe from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries in Germany, France, and England. Early scholarship was concerned primarily with recreating Pindar’s biography through his poetry or in proving the thematic unity (or disunity) of a certain poem or a set of poems.
A seminal year in Pindaric criticism and reception was 1962, when E. Bundy published Studia Pindarica; there he argued that the structure of the Pindaric epinikion dictated the poet’s language use. This work shattered the field’s previous focus on biographical or political approaches to Pindar’s poetry. Modern scholarship (post-1960s) focuses mainly on the different genres of Pindar's corpus as distinct and formulaic bodies of poetry, on the literary and historical exegesis of particular poems, and on the ways in which Pindar uses the ethical catch-words of the day as maxims to elucidate the praise of athletic victors. Much work of value has also been completed on Pindar’s use of myth and his relationship to other composers and Greek literary traditions. Most recently, scholars have developed an interest in Pindar’s relationship to epichoric traditions as well as in Pindar’s relationship to cult and occasion.
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