Pindar

Poet

Born: c. 518 b. c.e.; Cynoscephalae, near Thebes, Boeotia, Greece Died: c. 438 b. c.e.; Argos, Greece Category: Poetry; literature

Life Pindar (PIHN-dur), known for his Epinikia (498-446 b. c.e.; Odes, 1656), was born at Cynoscephalae, near Thebes, about 518 b. c.e. Through his parents, Daiphantus and Cleodice, who came from a family claiming descent from Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, Pindar could regard ancient Greek gods and heroes as part of his family. As training for his poetic career, Pindar began to study the flute, first in Thebes under his uncle Scopelinus, and later in Athens. He began writing odes at the age of twenty, losing in his first competition, to a poet named Corinna, because he had neglected to use mythology. He learned his lesson, and for the next fifty years he was highly regarded for his paeans to Apollo and Zeus and his hymns to Persephone and others.

Pindar’s home was chiefly Thebes, but he frequently visited Athens, which was then gaining in literary reputation, and he spent several years at the court of Hieron I of Syracuse. There he wrote what was to be called the Pindaric Ode, the epinician, a poem to welcome home the victors in the national games: the Pythian, the Isthmian, the Nemean, and the Olympic. Pindar’s formula was to select a myth and then in some way relate it to the victor and provide words for the chorus to use in the parade. From internal evidence many of the forty-five odes that survive intact can be dated by the games whose victors he celebrates.

Influence High moral tone, patriotism, and religious fervor characterize the works of this outstanding Greek lyric poet. Though he wrote them to order, and was paid for them, the odes show no signs of cheapening art for cash. Not until they were imitated in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did the form become debased. Only fragments of Pindar’s other poems survive.

Further Reading

Carne-Ross, D. S. Pindar. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,

1985.

Crotty, Kevin. Song and Action: The Victory Odes of Pindar. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Currie, Bruno. Pindar and the Cult of Heroes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Fitzgerald, William. Agonistic Poetry: The Pindaric Mode in Pindar, Horace, Hoelderlin, and the English Ode. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Hamilton, John T. Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature, 2003.

Hornblower, Simon. Thucydides and Pindar: Historical Narrative and the World of Epinikian Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Kurke, Leslie. The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Politics of Social Economy. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Nagy, Gregory. Pindar’s Homer: Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Newman, John K., and Frances Stickney Newman. Pindar’s Art: Its Tradition and Aims. Munich: Weidmann, 1984.

Race, William H. Pindar. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

_. Style and Rhetoric in Pindar’s Odes. Atlanta: Scholars Press,

1990.

Rutherford, Ian. Pindar’s Paeans: A Reading of the Fragments with a Survey of the Genre. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

David H. J. Larmour

See also: Corinna of Tanagra; Hieron I of Syracuse; Literature; Lyric Poetry.