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Pindar's life
The names of Pindar's parents are variously given. If we follow the
prevalent statement, he was the son of Daïphantos; and his
son, in turn, after established Greek usage, bore the name
Daïphantos. His brother, of uncertain name, was a mighty
hunter, and much given to athletic sports, and this has suggested
the unfailing parallel of Amphion and Zethos. The names of his
mother, Kleodike (or Kleidike), of his wife, whether Timoxene or
Megakleia, his daughters, Protomache and Eumetis, have an
aristocratic ring, for there were aristocratic names in antiquity as
in modern times. There is no reason for mythologizing Kleodike,
Timoxene, Megakleia. As well allegorize Aristeides, Perikles,
Demosthenes, because their names happen to fit their fortunes. But
Pindar's aristocratic origin rests on surer foundations, and we have
good reason for calling him an Aigeid (P.
5.69-71). What the relations were between the Theban and the
Spartan Aigeidai is a matter of lively discussion. It is enough for
understanding Pindar that it was an ancient and an honored house,
and that Pindar was in every fibre an aristocrat. This explains his
intimacy with men of rank, and his evident connection with the
priesthood — the stronghold of the aristocracy. To his
aristocratic birth, no less than to his lofty character, was due his
participation in the θεοξένια, or
banquet of the gods at Delphi — an honor which was
perpetuated in his family; and the story that he was a priest of
Magna Mater is confirmed by his own words (P. 3.77-79), if not suggested by them.
Pindar was born at Thebes, the head of Boeotia — Boeotia, a
canton hopelessly behind the times, a slow canton, as the nimble Attics would
say, a glorious climate for eels, but a bad air for brains. Large
historical views are not always entertained by the cleverest minds,
ancient and modern, transatlantic and cisatlantic; and the annals of
politics, of literature, of thought, have shown that out of the
depths of crass conservatism and proverbial sluggishness come, not
by any miracle, but by the process of accumulated force, some of the
finest intelligences, some of the greatest powers, of political,
literary, and especially religious life. Modern illustrations might
be invidious, but modern illustrations certainly lie very near.
Carrière compares Boeotia with Austria and the Catholic
South of Germany at the close of the eighteenth century, with their
large contributions to the general rise of culture in song and
music. If such parallels are not safe, it may be safe to adduce one
that has itself been paralleled with the story of the Island of the
Saints, and to call attention to the part that the despised province
of Cappadocia played in the history of the Christian Church. A
Cappadocian king was a butt in the time of Cicero; the Cappadocians
were the laughing-stock of the Greek anthology, and yet there are no
prouder names in the literary history of the Church than the names
of the Cappadocian fathers, Basil and the Gregories. But, apart from
this, Boeotia has been sadly misjudged. Pindar, Pelopidas, and
Epameinondas were not all, nor yet the πρέσβειρα Κωπᾴδων κορᾶν of the Acharnians. There
is no greater recommendation of the study of Greek lyric poetry than
this — that it enfranchises the reader from Athenian
prejudice and Athenian malice, while Athens herself is not less dear
than before. Pindar, then, was an aristocrat in a canton1
that a modern census-taker might have shaded with select and special
blackness. Himself born at Thebes, his parents are said
to have come to the city from an outlying northwestern deme,
Kynoskephalai, a high hill overlooking the swamp Hylike. Of his
infancy we know nothing. The tale that bees distilled honey on his
lips is told over and over of the childhood of poets and
philosophers. Non sine dis animosus
infans, we are as ready to believe to be true of him as of
any other great man. Of course he enjoyed the advantage of an
elaborate training. Perhaps Boeotians trained even more than did the
Athenians. The flute he learned at home, and it is supposed that at
a later period he
enjoyed the instructions of Lasos of Hermione, the regenerator of
the dithyramb; although it must be noted that the Greeks have an
innocent weakness for connecting as many famous names as possible in
the relation of teacher and pupil. The statement imposes on nobody.
One goes to school to every great influence. It is only honest to
say, however, that if Pindar studied under Lasos he was either an
ungrateful scholar or underrated his indebtedness to his master.
Unfortunately the jibbing pupils are sometimes the best, and the
teacher's fairest results are sometimes gained by the resistance of
an active young mind. At all events, Pindar has very little to say
about training in his poems, much about native endowment, which was
to him, as an aristocrat, largely hereditary. We may therefore
dismiss Pindar's teachers — Skopelinos, Apollodoros,
Agathokles. It is enough for us to know or to divine that he was
carefully trained, and had to submit to the rude apprenticeship of
genius. First a drillmaster for others, then a composer on his own
account, he had to work and wait. His great commissions did not come
until he had won a national name. Goethe has commended, as others
had done before and others have done since, the counsel of noble
women to all who seek the consummation of art, the caput artis, decere. Korinna — the
story is at least well invented — Pindar's fellow-student, not
his teacher, gave him a great lesson. In his first poem, he had
neglected to insert myths. Admonished of this omission by Korinna,
and remembering that his monitress was herself famous
for her handling of the myth, he crowded his next hymn with
mythological figures — the fragment is still preserved
(II. 1, 2) — whereupon she said, with a smile:
“One ought to sow with the hand, not with the whole
sack” (τῇ χειρὶ δεῖν σπείρειν
ἀλλὰ μὴ ὅλῳ τῷ θυλάκῳ). It is unnecessary to
emphasize the feminine tact of the advice. On another occasion
Korinna is said to have blamed Pindar for having used an Attic word.
This, also, is not a bad invention. It accords with the conservative
character of woman; it accords with the story that Korinna won a
victory over Pindar by the familiar charm of her Boeotian dialect as
well as by the beauty of her person, a beauty not lost in the
picture at Tanagra, which represented her in the act of encircling
her head with a fillet of victory. Aelian, an utterly untrustworthy
scribbler, adds that Pindar, in the bitterness of his heart, called
his successful rival a swine. If Pindar used the phrase at all, it
must be remembered that Βοιωτία
ὗς (O. 6.90) was a common
expression — half spiteful, half sportive — and
that the moral character of the swine stood higher with the Greeks
than it stands with us. The swine-woman of Phokylides, who was
neither good nor bad, was not the sow of the Old Testament or the
New. The Greeks were brotherly to the lower animals. Bull, cow,
heifer, cock, ass, dog, were at all events not beneath the level of
the highest poetry.
Encouraged, perhaps, by Korinna's success, a younger poetess, Myrtis,
attempted to cope with Pindar. She was ingloriously defeated, and sharply
chidden by Korinna, with the sweet inconsistency of her sex.
Pindar was twenty years old when he composed the tenth Pythian in
honor of Hippokleas of Thessaly. This poem, as the firstling of
Pindar's genius, has a special interest; but it requires determined
criticism to find in it abundant evidence of the crudeness of youth.
If Pindar was twenty years old at the time when he composed the
tenth Pythian, and the tenth Pythian was written in honor of
a victory gained Pyth. 22 (Ol. 69, 3=502 B.C.), Pindar must have
been born in 522 B.C. A close contemporary of Aischylos
(born 525 B.C.), Pindar suggests a comparison with the great
Athenian; but no matter how many external resemblances may be found,
nay, no matter how many fine sentiments and exemplary reflections
they may have in common, the inner dissidence remains.2 One question always
arises when the Μαραθωνομάχης and
Pindar are compared, and that is the attitude of the Theban poet
during the Persian Pindar and the
Persian war. |
war. Was Pindar in thorough sympathy with the
party of the Theban nobility to which he belonged by birth, by
training, by temperament, or was he a friend of the national cause
— as it is safe to call a cause after it has been
successful? Within the state there seems to be no question that
Pindar was a thoroughpaced aristocrat, and those who think they have
noticed greater liberality in the middle of his life have to
acknowledge that he became more rigid towards the close. Without the
state his imagination must have been fired by the splendid
achievements of the Hellenes, and his religious sense must have been
stirred by the visible working of the divine power in setting up and
putting down. He could not but be proud of the very victories that
told against his own country, and yet there is no note in all his
poems that shows the kinship that reveals itself in Simonides. The
story that the famous fragment in praise of Athens brought upon him
the displeasure of his countrymen, which they manifested by the
imposition of a heavy fine, reimbursed twofold by the Athenians
— this story, with all its variations, the statue, the
προξενία, has not escaped the
cavils of the critics, and does not, in any case, prove anything
more than a generous recognition of the prowess of an alien state,
if, after all, anything Greek could be alien to a man so fully in
sympathy with all that made Greece what it was. For in
the sense that he loved all Greece, that he felt the ties of blood,
of speech, above all, the ties of religion, Pindar was Panhellenic.
The pressure of the barbarian that drew those ties tighter for
Greece generally, drew them tighter for him also; but how? We are in
danger of losing our historical perspective by making Pindar feel
the same stir in the same way as Aischylos. If he had, he would not
have been a true Theban; and if he had not been a true Theban, he
would not have been a true Greek. The man whose love for his country
knows no local root, is a man whose love for his country is a poor
abstraction; and it is no discredit to Pindar that he went honestly
with his state in the struggle. It was no treason to Medize before
there was a Greece, and the Greece that came out of the Persian war
was a very different thing from the cantons that ranged themselves
on this side and on that of a quarrel which, we may be sure, bore
another aspect to those who stood aloof from it than it wears in the
eyes of moderns, who have all learned to be Hellenic patriots. A
little experience of a losing side might aid historical vision. That
Pindar should have had an intense admiration of the New Greece,
should have felt the impulse of the grand period that followed
Salamis and Plataia, should have appreciated the woe that would have
come on Greece had the Persians been successful, and should have
seen the finger of God in the new evolution of Hellas —
all this is not incompatible with an attitude during the Persian war
that those who see the end and do not understand the beginning may
not consider respectable.
The life of a lyric poet was usually a life of travel. Arion is the
type of a wanderer, Ibykos and Simonides journeyed far and wide, and
although we must not suppose that Pindar went whithersoever his song
went, he was not a home-keeping man. His long sojourn in Sicily is
beyond a doubt. Aigina must have been to him a second home. Journeys
to Olympia, to Delphi, to Nemea, are certain. If he studied under
Lasos, he must have studied at Athens, and it is likely that he was
familiar with many parts of Greece, that he went as
far north as Macedon, as far south as Kyrene. Everywhere he was
received with respect, with veneration. Myths were woven about him as about few
poets, even in myth-loving Greece. Not only did the princes of earth
treat him as their peer, but the gods showed him distinguished
honor. The Delphic priests, as we have seen, invited him to the
θεοξένια as a guest of the
divinities, and, more than this, Pan himself sang a poem of
Pindar's, and Pindar returned thanks for the honor in the parthenion beginning Ὦ Πάν. Of a piece with this story is
the other that Pindar had a vision of a walking statue of Magna
Mater, and it is needless to say that Magna Mater, Pan, and the rest
are all combinations from various allusions in his poems. Unworthy
of critical examination as they are, such stories are not to be
passed by in silence, because they reflect the esteem in which the
poet was held.
The death of Pindar, as well as his life, was a fruitful theme. The
poet prayed for that which was best for man. The god, —
Ammon, or Apollo, — sent him death on the lap of his
favorite Theoxenos, — according to one legend, in the
theatre at Argos, according to another, in the gymnasium. His bones,
however, rested in Thebes. Persephone — or was it Demeter?
— appeared to him in vision, and reproached him with not
having celebrated her in song, her alone of all the deities, and she
prophesied at the same time that he would soon make up for his
shortcomings when he should be with her. In less than ten days
Pindar had gone to “the blackwalled house of
Phersephona” (O. 14.20),
daughter of Demeter. After his death he appeared in vision to an
aged kinswoman, and repeated a poem on Persephone, which she wrote
down after she awoke, as Coleridge did Kubla Khan, and thus
preserved it for after-times. The time of Pindar's death is very
uncertain. It is commonly supposed that he lived to an
advanced age. Some make him die at eighty; others see no proof of
his having gone beyond sixtysix. One prudent soul, with wise
reserve, says he did not live to see the outbreak of the
Peloponnesian war. The latest poem that we can date
certainly is O. 4 (Ol. 82, 452 B.C.), but P. 8 is often assigned to
450 B.C.
Sundry apophthegms are attributed to Pindar. Most of them show the
aloofness, so to speak, of his character. “What is sharper than
a saw? Calumny.” “What wilt thou sacrifice to
the Delphic god? A paean.” “Why dost thou, who
canst not sing, write songs? The shipbuilders make rudders but know
not how to steer.” “Simonides has gone to the
courts of the Sicilian tyrants. Why hast thou no desire to do the
same? I wish to live for myself, not for others.” These
expressions at least reproduce the temper of the man as conceived by
antiquity. Such a self-contained personage could never have made
himself loved by a wide circle. Admired he was without stint, often
without true insight. The reverence paid his genius was manifested
in many ways. Familiar to all is the story that when Thebes was
pillaged and destroyed by the Macedonian soldiery, the house of
Pindar was spared3 by the express order of Alexander the Great, whose ancestor
he had celebrated in song (fr. VIII. 3).
