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Pindar's thought
Men who themselves owed everything to form have been found to
maintain that translation conveys the essential, and that the
highest survives the process of transmission without any
considerable loss. Far less dangerous is the paradox of Moriz Haupt,
“
Do not translate: translation is the death of understanding.
The first stage is to learn to translate; the second to see
that translation is impossible.1
” In the transfer to a foreign language the word loses its
atmosphere, its associations, its vitality. The angle at which it
meets the mental vision is often changed, the rhythm of the sentence
is lost. The further one penetrates into the life of a language, the
harder does translation become; and so we often have the result that
the version of the young student is better than that of the
experienced scholar, because the latter tries to express too much,
and hence falls into paraphrase and sheer cumbrousness. The true
vision of a work of literary art is to be gained by the study of the
original, and by that alone. And this holds even as to the ethic
value of poetry. To put Pindar's thoughts, his views of life, into
other words, is often to sacrifice the delicate point on which the
whole moral turns. If this is true of the single word, the single
sentence, it holds with still more force of the attempt to form an
image of the poet's world of thought and feeling by the simple
process of cataloguing translations of his most
striking thoughts under certain rubrics. This has been done by
various scholars, notably by Bippart and by Buchholz.2 With their help
one can give ode and verse for Pindar's attitude towards the beliefs
of his time, for his views of the gods and heroes, of human destiny,
of politics, practical and speculative, of Pindar's relations to
persons.3 One can give ode and verse for Pindar's belief in
blood, in genius, for his contempt of the groundlings, for his
tenets of art, of life, of government, if, indeed, we dare break up
the antique unity in which all three are merged. But the methodical
channels in which Pindar's poetical vein is thus made to run give no
notion of the play of the poet's genius. The stream that escapes
from the waste-pipe of a fountain gives no notion of the rise and
fall and swirl and spray and rainbow glitter of the volume of water
that rejoices to return the sportive touch of the sunlight. The
catechism has its uses, but it is not the Bible, and as there is no
space in this essay for a Pindaric catechism, it must suffice to
show how much the study of a few odes will teach us of what Pindar
believed concerning God, and what duty he thought God required of
man. True, to the great question, “What is God?”
Pindar has no answer in any of his odes; he is as silent as
Simonides. But when we ask, “Are there more gods than
one?” the answer comes speedily from the first Olympian,
“There be gods many and lords many.” Zeus
dominates officially (v. 10), and some see in this, as
in the use of θεός and δαίμων elsewhere, a tendency to the
monotheistic idea, but Poseidon (vv.
40, 73, 75), who held the
Peloponnesos in his embrace, rules the myth. We are reminded of
Kronos (v. 10); Aphrodite is not
forgotten (v. 75), nor one of the
great powers behind the throne, Klotho (v.
26), — to say nothing of the unfailing Muses
(v. 112). We are in the familiar world of Greek
divinities. The poet's attitude towards the gods is that of his
people, and a study of all the odes would only confirm the
impression of the first. Nearly every ode is full of gods. Not one
of the shining forms of the great divinities is lacking, not even
Hestia, who has a large space in N. 11. Pindar's world of the gods
is an organized state, won by the victory of Zeus over the Titanic
brood. In the first Olympian, as in all the Olympians, Zeus rules
serenely. It is true that his throne, Aitna, rests on the violent
hundred-headed Typhoeus (O. 4.6), but
we do not feel the stirrings of the revolted spirit as in P. 1.15, or in P. 8.16, for the Pythians magnify the office of Apollo,
who is the Word of Zeus, the god that bids harmony and measure reign
in state and man. The being of Apollo is much more deeply inwrought
with the Pythian odes than that of Zeus with the Olympian.
This belief in the gods, or acceptance of the gods, did not involve
belief in this or that special myth. The historical books of the
unwritten Bible, so to speak, were open to all manner of scepticism,
as we know from the annals of the time, as well as from Pindar.
Every one remembers Xenophanes' revolt against the fables of Greek
mythology. So, Pindar, in the famous passage, beginning
(v. 28)
“ἦ θαυματὰ πολλά, καί πού τι καὶ
βροτῶν, κτἑ.”
, speaks of legends cunningly set off with glittering
falsehoods. He distrusts the myth, he resolutely refuses to believe
it when it jeopards the honor of God. He who himself invokes Charis
for the praise of man, dreads her persuasive power in things divine.
“I cannot call one of the blessed cannibal.”
There is a conflict in Pindar's poems on this subject as on others.
We of this time know well what this means, for doubt runs through
all our literature. Only the antique poet is not tortured by his
doubts; the priestly temper conquers. He keeps his tongue from aught
that would offend the god, and leaves the god himself to reconcile
the partial views of his worshippers. The cultivation of a religious
temper is his resource against scepticism, and this age has seen
many shining examples of critical knowledge held in
harmless solution by reverence for the divine. Pindar's criticism,
it must be confessed, is of the crudest. His interpretation of the
story of the cannibalic meal of the gods is very much in the vein of
the most prosaic school of Greek mythologists, and not unlike what
we find in early rationalistic criticism of the Biblical narrative.
In similar straits he simply cries out, “
ἀπό μοι λόγον
τοῦτον, στόμα, ῥῖψον:
ἐπεὶ τό γε λοιδορῆσαι θεοὺς
ἐχθρὰ σοφία.
”
Still limiting our vision to the first Olympian, we ask,
“What is Pindar's view of human life, human
destiny?” The Greek wail over our mortality is heard here
also. “The immortals sent Pelops straight back to dwell
again among the tribes of men whose doom is speedy” (v. 65). And banished Pelops cries
—
“θανεῖν δ᾽ οἷσιν ἀνάγκα”
(v. 82)
— “As we needs must die, why should one
nurse a nameless old age in darkness idly sitting, and all in
vain?” Life is darkness unless it be lighted up by victory
such as the sunshine of Olympia (v.
97), but that is all. The light within man is darkness, and
the light that comes from without depends on the favor of God. God
has Hieron's cause at heart (v.
106), but God may fail. “If he fail not
speedily” (v. 108), then
— This strain is heard over and over again, the shortness
and the sorrows of human Man is of
few days and full of trouble. |
life, the transitoriness of
its pleasures, the utter dependence on the will of an envious God.
We feel throughout that we are in the atmosphere of Hesiod rather
than in the atmosphere of Homer, and yet Homer is sadder than either
by reason of the contrasting sunshine. Instead of searching for
texts, read the eighth Pythian, the Ecclesiastes of the odes.
It is true that the first Olympian would not be the best place to
look for Pindar's views of government. The ode from beginning to end
has to do with the summits of things, not the foundations. But when
in another
Hieronic ode (P. 1, 61) he comes to
the basis of the state, we find that Hieron founded Aitna in honor
of Zeus, “with godbuilt freedom in the use and wont
(νόμοις) of Hyllid
standard.” In these few words we have everything. We have
the dedication to the Supreme, we have liberty based
on God's will, we have a life directed by hereditary usage. The word
νόμοις is a concession to the
times — for Homer knows nothing of νόμος — but we still feel the
“use and wont;” νόμος is not “law” to Pindar, it is
“way.” So in his earliest poem he says,
P. 10.70:
“ὑψοῦ φέροντι νόμον Θεσσαλῶν”
, and a high and mighty way was the way of the Thessalians.
How Pindar felt when the spirit of Tranquillity was violated we see
by P. 8 — the truest expression of the aristocrat alarmed
and grieved for his order.
The next point suggested by the first Olympian is the representative
position of Pindar as the expounder of Greek Pindar an expounder of Greek ethics. |
ethics.
Is Pindar speaking for himself or for his people? Many of his
thoughts are not his own. They are fragments of the popular Hellenic
catechism, and they become remarkable in Pindar partly by the mode
of presentation, partly by the evident heartiness with which he
accepts the national creed. So in v.
56, and P. 2.28, we find a
genealogy which was as popular with the Greeks as Sin and Death in the Christian system. Ὄλβος — Κόρος — Ὕβρις —
Ἄτη. The prosperity that produces pride and fulness
of bread culminates in overweening insolence and outrage, and brings
on itself mischief sent from heaven. That is not Pindar, any more
than it is Solon, than it is Theognis, Aischylos. But the genius
that stamps these commonplaces into artistic form, that gives to the
wisdom of the many the wit of the one, and makes the doctrine a
proverb, this was Pindar's, and Pindar's was the believing soul that
breathed into the dead dogma the breath of a living and a working
faith; and we call that man great who thinks and utters the people's
thought best.
So it is no new doctrine that he teaches when he insists so much on
the corollary of the abhorred genealogy just cited — the
necessity of self-control. Laws are only symptoms, not remedies of
disease in the body politic. Whenever crime is rife, legislation is
rife, that is all, and the μηδὲν
ἄγαν, the σωφροσύνη, on
which the Greek laid so much stress, points to the moral
difficulties of an impulsive race, whose moral harmony seems to be artistic rather than moral. The Greeks were too airy,
too much like Hermes, of whom comparative mythologists have made the morning breeze, too little like
Apollo. The text, then, on which Greek moralists preached longest
and loudest, on which Pindar preached loudest and oftenest, is the
need of self-control. Pindar cares not whether it be the old, old
story or not. This negative gospel is the burden of his moralizing.
So in the first Olympian,
v. 114:
“μηκέτι πάπταινε πόρσιον”
. “Be thou not tempted to strain thy gaze to aught
beyond.” “As far as the pillars of Herakles, but
no further; that is not to be approached by wise or
unwise” (O. 3.44). And so
in every key, “Let him not seek to become a god”
(O. 5.24), or, if that is not
Pindar, “Seek thou not to become Zeus” (I. 4
[5], 14). “The brazen heavens are not to be
mounted,” says the moralist of twenty (P. 10.27). μέτρῳ κατάβαινε, says Pindar the aged (P. 8.78).
Another point also discernible in the first Olympian is the lofty
self-consciousness of genius. This Pindar shows in all his
poems, and strikingly here. His theme is high, but he is level with
his high theme. If higher come, he can still ascend. A more glorious
victory shall receive a still sweeter song. The arrow shot has
reached the lone ether, but the Muse has still her strongest bolt in
reserve for him, and in his closing prayer he wishes a lofty career
for Hieron, and side by side with the prince let the poet stand,
πρόφαντον σοφίᾳ καθ᾽ Ἕλλανας ἐόντα
παντᾷ. The proud self-assertion is hardly veiled by
the prayer. In the second Olympian there is the same maintenance of
high pretension. In the first Olympian it is the Muse that keeps her
strongest bolt in reserve. In the second it is the poet himself that
keeps his arrow within his quiver (v. 92). He seems, as has been
said, to rise to the stature of Apollo himself in his proud scorn of
the Python brood. How, then, is this to be reconciled with the
self-control, the freedom from boasting, which Hellenic ethic
enjoins? It is because of the source of genius — God
himself. Pindar looks down on lesser poets as eagles on ravens (O. 2.96), on daws
(N. 3.82). Contempt, scorn,
superciliousness are hardly the words. It is a sublime looking over
the heads of his rivals with at most a faint consciousness of their
cawing far below. This is a dangerous assumption, an attitude that
may be nothing but a posture, and we resent it in inferior poets,
who take on Pindaric airs. But Pindar at his greatest height does
not forget by whom he is borne up, the limits of his god-given
power.
“χρὴ δὲ κατ᾽ αὐτὸν αἰεὶ παντὸς ὁρᾶν
μέτρον”
(P. 2.34)
. The little that he has to say about training bears on the
games rather than on his art. In O.
8.59 he is speaking expressly of a trainer,4 and there the meaning is disputed. Mild enough is O. 10 (11), 22.5 But elsewhere Nature is praised — often blended
with God and Fortune — to the exclusion of mere
learning, of the διδακταὶ ἀρεταί
of O. 9.108. τὸ δὲ φυᾷ κράτιστον ἅπαν is his motto. If
Pindar cultivated a choice garden of the Graces, it is by a skill
that Fate has allotted him (O. 9.27).
If men are good and wise, it is in accordance with a δαίμων (v. 28), and as if never weary of
the theme, he comes back to it in v. 100. Again it sounds forth in
O. 11 (10), 10: “wisdom
is of God.” When he longs for the good and the beautiful
it must come from God (P. 11.50).
Part and parcel of this belief in nature, in God, is his belief in
heredity. This comes out more crudely, as might be expected, in his
earliest poem — which is an arrangement in God and Blood
(P. 10), but it is no less fundamental in that which some consider
his latest (P. 8), when he intimates, not obscurely, that the hope
of Aigina rests on the transmitted virtues of her noble stock.
Pindar has been called a Pythagorean, but this is saying nothing more
than that he shared with Pythagoras the belief in the doctrine of the
immortality of the soul, which had its main support in the Delphic
oracle and in the Pythian temple. The symbolism of this belief is found everywhere in Greek religion,
especially in the Bacchic cycle, and in the mysteries of the Twain
Deities, Demeter and Persephone. The second Olympian shows his creed
in part as to the future world.6 Such a creed, it
may be noted, is of a piece with the aristocratic character of his
mind, the continuation of the proper distinction between Good and
Bad, in the Doric sense, not a system of revenges for the inequality
of present fortune, as too many consider it. The grave is not all
silence to Pindar; the ghost of sound, Echo, may visit the abode of
the dead, and bear glad tidings to those who have gone before (O. 14.21). Immortality has not been
brought to light, but the feeling hand of the poet has found it in
the darkness of Persephone's home.
