Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pindar was an ancient Greek lyric poet born around 518 BC in Cynoscephalae, Boeotia. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian called him by far the greatest of the nine canonical lyric poets of ancient Greece, citing his "inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence."
Pindar composed seventeen books of poetry organized by genre, including hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, processionals, maiden songs, laments, and victory odes. Only the four books of epinikia, the victory odes celebrating athletic victories, survive in complete form; the rest exist only as fragments in ancient quotations and papyrus scraps found in Egypt.
Pindar's victory odes were written to commemorate triumphs at the four great Panhellenic athletic festivals: the Olympian Games at Olympia, the Pythian Games at Delphi, the Isthmian Games at Corinth, and the Nemean Games at Nemea. The surviving odes are grouped into four books named after these festivals.
Theban authorities fined Pindar 5,000 drachmae for praising Athens in his odes, calling the city "bulwark of Hellas" and "city of noble name and sunlit splendour." Thebes had sided with the Persians and suffered for it, making Pindar's flattery of Athens a source of civic resentment. The Athenians reportedly responded by gifting Pindar 10,000 drachmae.
When Alexander the Great demolished Thebes in 335 BC as punishment for the city's resistance to Macedonian expansion, he ordered Pindar's house to be left intact. This act of preservation was made out of gratitude for verses Pindar had composed praising Alexander's ancestor, Alexander I of Macedon.
The victory odes survived through a manuscript tradition, with generations of medieval scribes copying from earlier copies. They are preserved in just two complete manuscripts, both from the medieval period. Scholars including C. M. Bowra, who produced the 1935 Oxford University Press edition, traced their lineage back to a common archetype estimated to date no earlier than the 2nd century AD.