Pindar

• 1. Introduction

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  Pindar was born around 518 BC in Cynoscephalae, a small village in Boeotia, not far from Thebes. He would become the poet whose work Quintilian called, by far the greatest of the nine canonical lyric poets of ancient Greece, praising his "inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence." Yet the same poet was described by the Athenian playwright Eupolis as already being "reduced to silence by the disinclination of the multitude for elegant learning."

  That tension sits at the heart of Pindar's story. Universally admired by critics across more than two millennia. Largely unread by the general public. His poems challenge even the devoted reader, and yet fragments of his verse were inscribed in letters of gold on a temple wall in Lindos, Rhodes. When Alexander the Great demolished Thebes in 335 BC, punishing the city for resisting Macedonian power, he ordered Pindar's house to be left standing.

  Who was this man? What did he believe about gods, heroes, and the brief lives of mortals? And how did his work survive at all, when the writings of nearly all his rivals crumbled into dust and scattered fragments? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. A Life in Commissions

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  Pindar was about twenty years old in 498 BC when the ruling family of Thessaly commissioned him to write his first victory ode, Pythian 10, for a boy's foot-race won by Hippocles. He had studied lyric poetry in Athens under Lasos of Hermione, and he is also said to have received helpful criticism from the poet Corinna.

  His career unfolded during one of the most turbulent periods in Greek history. The first Persian invasion ended at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. The second Persian invasion, which Pindar lived through in his late thirties, left Thebes occupied by the Persian general Mardonius. Many Theban aristocrats who had sided with Persia perished at the Battle of Plataea. It is thought that Pindar may have spent much of this time on the island of Aegina.

  Work took him across the entire Greek world. Commissions drew him to the four great Panhellenic festival sites: Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea. He traveled westward to Sicily, eastward to the coast of Asia Minor, north to Macedonia and the city of Abdera, and south to Cyrene on the African coast. Pindar not only composed the odes but wrote the music and choreographed the dances, sometimes training performers at his home in Thebes, sometimes at the venue itself.

  In 476-75 BC he visited the courts of the Sicilian tyrants Theron of Acragas and Hieron of Syracuse, a connection that would bring him trouble back home. He composed a victory ode for Hieron in 470 BC, Pythian 1, celebrating Greek victories against foreign invaders at Salamis, Plataea, Himera, and Cumae. His Theban neighbors, who had allied with the Persians and suffered for it, were not pleased. His praise of Athens with phrases such as "bulwark of Hellas" led the Theban authorities to fine him 5,000 drachmae. The Athenians reportedly replied with a gift of 10,000 drachmae.

• 3. Rivals and Patrons

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  Simonides and his nephew Bacchylides were among the poets who competed with Pindar for patronage at the same courts and festivals. In Olympian 2 and Pythian 2, both composed in honor of the Sicilian tyrants following his 476-75 BC visit, Pindar deployed the images of ravens and an ape, which ancient commentators read as thinly veiled attacks on rivals engaged in a campaign of smears against him.

  In Isthmian 2, he referred to the Muse as "a hireling journeyman," long interpreted as a pointed reference to Simonides, who was known for charging high fees. Some scholars, however, read the passage as Pindar himself requesting overdue payment. The question has never been resolved.

  His relationship with Corinna was equally complicated. She was a fellow Boeotian poet who reportedly defeated him five times in poetry competitions. In one of his odes, Olympian 6, line 89, he called her a "Boeotian sow." Ancient commentators assumed this was revenge for his losses. Modern scholars think the phrase was aimed at a reputation all Boeotians had for stupidity, and that Pindar's losses to Corinna may have been invented by those same commentators to explain the insult.

  In 462 BC, Pindar composed two odes, Pythians 4 and 5, in honor of Arcesilas, king of Cyrene, using the occasion to plead for the return from exile of his friend Demophilus. He also used the ode to claim shared ancestry with the king, describing himself as an Aegeid, a descendant of the legendary king Aegeus of Athens. The historian Herodotus considered the Aegeid clan important enough to warrant mention in his Histories. Membership in that lineage, spread across Thebes, Lacedaemonia, Cyrene, and Thera, may well have smoothed Pindar's path through the Greek world's aristocratic networks.

• 4. The Victory Odes

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  Forty-five complete victory odes survive, grouped into four books named after the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean Games. They range from a single triad of stanzas to the vast Pythian 4, which comprises thirteen triads, making it the longest and most elaborate of all.

  The odes were not mere sports reports. Athletic victories at the Panhellenic festivals carried social weight far beyond anything that attaches to athletic prizes today. Attendance required wealth and leisure, and the prestige of victory was bound up with aristocratic display and self-promotion. Even in the 5th century BC, when professionalism was growing, these events were still predominantly aristocratic assemblies.

  Pindar's odes follow a recognizable architecture. They open with an invocation to a god or the Muses. Praise of the victor, his family, and his home city follows. Then comes the central narrative myth, usually the longest section, which draws a moral and aligns the audience with the world of gods and heroes. The ode closes with eulogies of trainers and ancestors, prayers, and hopes for future victories. The athletic event itself is almost never described in detail.

  Some odes drift far from their nominal athletic pretext. Pythian 3, composed in honor of Hieron of Syracuse, mentions a past victory at the Pythian Games only briefly. Its real purpose was to console Hieron for a chronic illness. Nemean 11 celebrates a municipal election victory on the island of Tenedos, not a Panhellenic contest at all. These outlier odes were gathered at the end of the Nemean book precisely because the original manuscripts were ordered by the prestige of the festival, and odes without a Panhellenic subject needed somewhere to go.

  The scholarly tools for dating the odes were assembled from ancient victor lists: the Olympic register compiled by Hippias of Elis, and the Pythian victor lists made by Aristotle and Callisthenes. No such records existed for the Isthmian and Nemean Games. The geographer Pausanias complained that the Corinthians and Argives never kept proper records, and the uncertainty that resulted is still visible in modern chronological tables, where question marks cluster around the Nemean and Isthmian entries.

• 5. Style and Myth

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  F. L. Lucas wrote that Pindar's power lies not in athletes' pedigrees but in "a splendour of phrase and imagery that suggests the gold and purple of a sunset sky." The classical scholar Richard Claverhouse Jebb noted his ability to bring gods and heroes into vivid relief and his "peculiar and inimitable splendour of style" that "can work magical effects with simple words." Gilbert Highet described his verse as "one burning glow which darted out a shower of brilliant images" and "passed through a commonplace leaving it luminous and transparent."

  What makes the style so difficult to follow is also what makes it memorable. Sentences are compressed to the point of obscurity. Unusual words and elaborate compound adjectives give the language an almost private quality. Transitions between ideas seem sudden or erratic. Yet the odes open with grand and arresting gestures, often using architectural metaphors or invocations to a place or goddess. Horace compared Pindar's verse to a river bursting its banks and rushing down a mountain, rain-saturated and churning with thunder.

  Pindar's handling of myth was equally distinctive. His original audiences already knew the stories, so he could work with variation and surprise rather than straightforward narrative. He often reversed chronological order, beginning with the culminating event and tracing back to what led to it. His account of the Dioscuri in Nemean 10 moves in a circular pattern: opening with a climax, revisiting the scenes that preceded it, then returning to its restatement.

  When a myth embarrassed him theologically, he edited it openly. In Nemean 5 he paused mid-poem to say: "Be still my tongue: here profits not to tell the whole truth with clear face unveiled." In Olympian 9 he interrupted himself: "Away, away this story! Let no such tale fall from my lips! For to insult the gods is a fool's wisdom." These self-interruptions were not weakness. They were part of a coherent theological position: that gods must not be depicted in demeaning roles, and that the dignity of myth could be preserved even while retelling it.

  In Olympian 1 he reworked the myth of Apollo's relationship with the nymph Cyrene. As the god of the Delphic oracle, Apollo is all-knowing. Yet he sought information about the nymph from the centaur Chiron, in keeping with his anthropomorphic nature. Pindar resolved the contradiction elegantly: Chiron answered Apollo's question with a compliment that affirmed the god's omniscience, as if Apollo had only pretended to be ignorant.

• 6. Gods, Heroes, and Men

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  Pindar was the first Greek poet, according to ancient and modern critics alike, to reflect systematically on what poetry is and what a poet's role should be. At a moment when choral poetry was being displaced by other forms, he defended it as the medium through which gods, heroes, and mortal men could meet.

  His view of the gods was more self-consistent and more reverent than Homer's. He dismissed the early philosophical tradition represented by Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, which had begun treating natural phenomena like eclipses as physical events. For Pindar, an eclipse was a portent of evil, full stop. He was equally indifferent to the religious reforms of his day. Where Aeschylus placed Fate behind the gods as an ultimate background force, Pindar subjected both fortune and fate to divine will, as in his phrase "child of Zeus... Fortune."

  Mythical heroes occupied an intermediate zone between gods and men in his theological framework. They were descendants of divine unions with privileged mortals, sympathetic to human ambitions, and capable of being judged by ordinary human standards in ways that gods were not. When the Theban hero Heracles needed to be compared with a small Theban patron who had won the pankration at the Isthmian Games, Pindar depicted Heracles as small to make the comparison work. It was, commentators noted, a unique example of his willingness to reshape tradition to fit the occasion.

  His most famous statement about the human condition appears at the conclusion of Pythian 8: "Creatures of a day! What is anyone? What is anyone not? A dream of a shadow is our mortal being. But when there comes to men a gleam of splendour given of heaven, then rests on them a light of glory and blessed are their days."

  For Pindar, lasting fame was men's greatest assurance of a life well-lived. His poems had no interest in the ordinary mass of people, whom he dismissed in Pythian Ode 2 as "the brute multitude." They were equally uninterested in the fate of the rich and powerful once they lost their wealth, unlike the bitter poems of Theognis of Megara. What mattered was what successful men did with their good fortune: success, in Pindar's view, brought obligations, and those obligations ran toward religion and the arts.

• 7. Survival and Legacy

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  Of the seventeen books that scholars at the Library of Alexandria organized from Pindar's compositions, only the four books of epinikia, the victory odes, survive in complete form. The hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, processionals, maiden songs, songs for light dances, songs of praise, and laments survive only as fragments, preserved in quotations by ancient authors or on scraps of papyrus found in Egypt.

  The discovery in 1896 of some poems by Pindar's rival Bacchylides proved unexpectedly useful for understanding Pindar himself. Before that find, some of his most unusual features had been attributed to individual eccentricity. The comparison with Bacchylides showed that many of these idiosyncrasies were typical of archaic Greek genres, not just of one peculiar poet.

  The victory odes survive in just two complete manuscripts, both dating from the medieval period. The problem of tracing their lineage occupied generations of scholars. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff inferred from the surviving manuscripts the existence of a common archetype no earlier than the 2nd century AD. C. M. Bowra, who produced the 1935 Oxford University Press edition, argued there were too many discrepancies to identify a specific lineage with confidence, even while accepting the archetype's existence. He worked from seven primary manuscripts, cross-referencing them against papyrus fragments and more doubtful secondary sources.

  Callimachus, the influential Alexandrian poet, was fascinated by Pindar's originality. His masterpiece Aetia included an elegy celebrating a chariot victory, composed in a Pindaric style. The Hellenistic epic Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius drew on Pindar's technique of episodic vignettes. During the 17th and 18th centuries, European literary theorists developed a whole category called the Pindaric ode, though the association with Pindar was, as scholars noted, largely fanciful. Abraham Cowley was considered the main English exponent of the form.

  A Pindaric Ode was composed for the revived Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 by the Oxford scholar George Stuart Robinson. Compositions in the same tradition were commissioned from the classicist Armand D'Angour for the Athens Olympics in 2004 and the London Olympics in 2012, nearly two and a half millennia after the boy from Cynoscephalae composed his first ode for a Thessalian chariot family.