Pindar of Thebes was born about 518 BC and died about 438, at the age of about eighty.1 Of the nine lyric poets whom the ancient world ranked as the classics, his work is the best preserved,1 and the Roman teacher Quintilian had no doubt about the order: “Of the nine lyric poets Pindar is by far the greatest”.2
What survives almost whole is one kind of song: the victory ode, written for a winner at the great games. Ancient scholars sorted the odes into four books, named after the four festivals: the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean games.1,3 The reader's text has forty-five of them: fourteen Olympian, twelve Pythian, eleven Nemean and eight Isthmian.30
Songs for winners
He started young. In 498 BC, when he was about twenty, the ruling family of Thessaly asked him for an ode on a boy's win in the double foot race at Delphi: Pythian 10, his earliest victory ode that can be dated.1,4 His customers came from the whole Greek world. Olympian 1, for Hieron, the ruler of Syracuse, and his racehorse, is dated 476 BC; it opens with «ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ», “Water is best”.5 He wrote for Theron of Acragas, for Arcesilas, king of Cyrene in Africa, and above all for the leading families of the island of Aegina, who ordered about a quarter of all the victory odes.1 Not every winner was an athlete. Pythian 12 is for Midas of Acragas, who won the contest for the pipes,6 and Nemean 11 honours Aristagoras of Tenedos on taking office as president of his island's council.7
A victory ode is not a sports report. The race itself hardly appears; instead the ode sets the win beside the gods, an old story from the winner's homeland, his family and his city.3 And then, suddenly, comes a line that has outlived every winner. Near the end of Pythian 8, for a boy wrestler from Aegina,3 Pindar says what a human being is: «ἐπάμεροι· τί δέ τις; τί δʼ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος», “Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow.”8 The first word is the dictionary's own example: LSJ gives ἐπάμερος as the Doric and Aeolic form of ἐφήμερος, and cites this very line.9 Pythian 8 is dated 446 BC, the latest of his odes with a firm date.1,10
How it sounded
Pindar probably spoke the Boeotian dialect of Thebes, but he sang in a literary language that leans on Doric, mixed with Aeolic and epic forms and a few Boeotian words.1 The traveller Pausanias noticed it too: Pindar's rival Corinna, he says, composed «οὐ τῇ φωνῇ τῇ Δωρίδι ὥσπερ ὁ Πίνδαρος», “not in Doric speech like Pindar”.11 You can see it in the first lines of Olympian 1, where the day is «ἐν ἁμέρᾳ», not the Attic ἡμέρα; LSJ lists ἀμέρα as the Doric form.9 The Muse is «Μοῖσα» (Olympian 3.4), which LSJ gives as the Aeolic form of Μοῦσα.9
The songs were made for music and dance. Pindar wrote the music and planned the dances himself.1 In Olympian 3 he says the victor's garlands demand that he blend “the embroidered song of the lyre and the cry of the flutes with the arrangement of words”.12 Most odes are built in threes: two stanzas with exactly the same metre (the strophe and antistrophe) and a third, different one (the epode). The shortest ode has one such triad; the longest, Pythian 4 for the king of Cyrene, has thirteen.1
Debated among scholars Who sang them is less certain than it looks. The ancient sources took it for granted that a chorus sang and danced each ode; some modern scholars argue that the odes were sung by one voice.1
The lost books
Ancient scholars at Alexandria collected his poems in seventeen books, arranged by kind: hymns, paeans (songs first sung for Apollo or Artemis), dithyrambs, processional songs, maiden-songs, songs for dancing, songs of praise, laments, and the four books of victory odes.1,3,23 Only the victory odes came down to us nearly complete.3 The rest survive in scraps of papyrus and in quotations.1
Some of his most famous words come from those lost books, kept alive because other writers quoted them. Herodotus, after telling how Greeks and Indians are each horrified by the other's funeral customs, decides that Pindar was right: «νόμον πάντων βασιλέα», “custom is lord of all”.13 In Plato's Gorgias the same words, «νόμος ὁ πάντων βασιλεὺς», “Law the sovereign of all”, are quoted by Callicles to argue that the strong have a natural right to rule, and he admits he does not know the poem well.14
Life and legend
Debated among scholars Almost everything told about his life comes from late sources: a short life on a papyrus, the traveller Pausanias, and Byzantine scholars writing many centuries after his death. Much of it is plainly fanciful, and since Elroy Bundy's Studia Pindarica of 1962 many scholars have doubted that the odes tell us about the poet's own feelings at all.1 Even the year of his birth is argued over: 518 BC is the usual date, but some prefer 522.3
He was born at Cynoscephalae, a village near Thebes, and is said to have learnt his art at Athens from the poet Lasus of Hermione.1,3
Ancient tradition / legend Pausanias tells the stories that grew up around him. As a young man walking to Thespiae in the summer heat, Pindar lay down to sleep by the road, and bees came and plastered his lips with wax: “Such was the beginning of Pindar's career as a lyric poet.” Later the priestess at Delphi told the Delphians to give him a share of the first-fruits offered to Apollo.15 In the temple at Delphi Pausanias was shown an iron chair on which, they said, Pindar used to sit and sing his songs to Apollo.16 At Tanagra he saw a painting of Corinna, said to have beaten Pindar in a song contest at Thebes.11 The tale of Corinna's victories was probably invented by ancient commentators.1
Athens had reason to thank him. In lines that survive only as a quotation (fragment 76) he called the city the “bulwark of Hellas”.1 Pausanias saw his statue in Athens, one of the rewards the Athenians gave him for praising them in a song.17
Ancient tradition / legend A later story says Thebes fined him for that praise, and the Athenians paid him twice the fine.1
He died at Argos, at about eighty, and his daughters brought his ashes home to Thebes.1,3 Pausanias saw his tomb in the horse-racing ground at Thebes, and the ruins of his house beyond the river Dirce.15,18
Ancient tradition / legend Pausanias also tells how the end came. In old age Persephone appeared to him in a dream and complained that she alone of the gods had no hymn from him; within ten days he was dead. Then he sang the hymn in a dream to an old woman of his family, who wrote it down.15
The house that Alexander spared
In 335 BC Alexander the Great destroyed Thebes for rising against Macedon, but left Pindar's house standing.1 The historian Arrian puts it carefully: «καὶ τὴν Πινδάρου δὲ τοῦ ποιητοῦ οἰκίαν καὶ τοὺς ἀπογόνους τοῦ Πινδάρου λέγουσιν ὅτι διεφύλαξεν Ἀλέξανδρος αἰδοῖ τῇ Πινδάρου», “they say that Alexander kept safe the house of Pindar the poet and his descendants, out of respect for Pindar” (our translation).19 Plutarch says that when the rest of the Thebans were sold into slavery, “the descendants of Pindar” were among those set apart.20 Nearly two thousand years later John Milton remembered the story in a sonnet: “The great Emathian Conqueror bid spare / The house of Pindarus”.21