Pindar, in spite of his great popularity among the Greeks, offers no exception to the rule that we know but little of the lives of the illustrious poets and artists of the world. His parents belonged to the town of CynoscephalÆ; but Pindar himself resided at Thebes, and spoke of Thebes as his native place—T?a ?te? ??. That his father was called Daiphantus appears tolerably certain; and we may fix the date of his birth at about 522 B.C. He lived to the age of seventy-nine; so that the flourishing period of his life exactly coincides with the great Persian struggle, in which he lived to see Hellas victorious. He had three children—a son, Daiphantus, and two daughters, Eumetis and Protomache. His family was among the noblest and most illustrious of Thebes, forming a branch of the ancient house of the ÆgeidÆ, who settled both at Thebes and Sparta in heroic times, and offshoots from whom were colonists of Thera and Cyrene. Thus many of the heroes celebrated by Pindar, and many of the illustrious men to whom he dedicates his odes, were of his own kin. Genius for the art seems to have been hereditary in the family of Pindar, as it was in that of Stesichorus and of Simonides; therefore, when the youth showed an aptitude for poetry, his father readily acceded to his wishes, and sent him to Athens to learn the art of composing for the chorus from Lasos, the then famous but now forgotten antagonist of the bard of Ceos. Before his twentieth year, Pindar returned to Thebes and took, it is said, instruction from the poetesses Myrtis and Corinna. To this period of his artistic career belongs the oft-told tale, according to which Corinna bade her pupil interweave myths with his panegyrics, and when, following her advice, he produced an ode in which he had exhausted all the Theban legends, told him t? ?e??? de?? spe??e??, ???? ? ??? t? ??????—that one ought to sow with the hand and not with the whole sack. Against both Myrtis and Corinna, Pindar entered the lists of poetical contest. Corinna is reported to have beaten him five times, and never to have been vanquished by her more illustrious rival. Pausanias hints that she owed her victories to her beauty, and to the fact that she wrote in a broad Æolic dialect, more suited to the ears of her judges than Pindar's Doric style. The same circumstance which insured her this temporary triumph may have caused her ultimate neglect. The fragment we possess of Corinna—

"I blame the clear-voiced Myrtis for that, a woman, she contended against Pindar," is curiously at variance with her own practice. Its Æolisms prove how local and provincial her language must have been.

The history of Pindar's life is the record of his poetical compositions. He was essentially a professional artist, taking no active part in politics, and studying to perfect his poetry all through the perilous days of Salamis and PlatÆa—like Michael Angelo, who went on modelling and hewing through the sack of Rome, the fall of Florence, the decline of Italian freedom, with scarce a word to prove the anguish of his patriot soul. Pindar, unlike his fellow-countrymen, did not side with the Persians, but felt enthusiasm for Athens, the ??e?sa ???ad?? (buttress of Hellas), as he calls her in a dithyramb[104] (Fr. iv.). For this he was made Proxenos of Athens, and received a present of 10,000 drachmas. It is said that the Thebans fined him for his implied reflections upon them, and that Athens paid the debt. These facts, if true, testify to the post of honor which a mighty poet occupied in Hellas, when the vox et prÆterea nihil of a bard, inspired indeed by Muses, but dependent on a patron for his bread, was listened to with such jealous ears by the rulers of great cities. The last Isthmian ode shows in what a noble spirit Pindar felt the dangers of Hellas during her deadly strife with Persia, and how he could scarcely breathe for anxiety until the stone of Tantalus suspended over her had been arrested. In the Proemium he says:

Pindar passed his time chiefly at Thebes, where his home was. But he also visited the different parts of Greece, frequently staying at Delphi, where the iron chair on which he sat and sang was long preserved; and also journeying to the houses of his patrons—Hiero of Syracuse, and presumably Theron of Agrigentum, and perhaps, too, Alexander of Macedon. Olympia must have often received him as a guest, as well as the island of Ægina, where he had many friends. Odes were sent by him to Cyrene, to Ceos, to Rhodes—on what tablets, we may wonder, adorned with what caligraphy from Pindar's stylus, in what casket worthy of the man who loved magnificence? The Rhodians inscribed his seventh Olympian—the most radiant panegyric of the sea-born isle of Helios—in letters of gold on the walls of their temple of the Lindian Athene. In the midst of his artistic labors, and while serving many patrons, Pindar, as we shall see, preserved his dignity and loftiness of moral character.

Pindar is said to have died in the theatre at Argos, in the arms of Theoxenos, a youth whom he loved passionately, and whom he has praised in the most sublime strains for his beauty in a scolion, the fragment of which we possess.[105] Anacreon choked by a grape-stone; Sophocles breathing out his life together with the pathetic lamentations of Antigone; Æschylus killed on the sea-shore by the eagle whose flight he had watched; Empedocles committing his fiery but turbid spirit to the flames of Etna; Sappho drowning her sorrows in the surf of the Leucadian sea; Ibycus, the poet-errant, murdered by land-robbers; Euripides torn to pieces like his own Pentheus; Archilochus honored in his death by an oracle that cursed his battle-foe; Pindar, amid the plaudits of the theatre, sinking back into the arms of his Theoxenos and dying in a noontide blaze of glory—these are the appropriate and dramatic endings which the literary gossips among the Greeks, always inventively ingenious, ascribed to some of their chief poets. Se non son veri, son ben trovati.

Some purely legendary details show the estimation in which

Pindar was held by his countrymen. Multitudes of bees are said to have settled on his lips when he was an infant. Pan chose a hymn of his and sang it on the mountains, honoring a mortal poet with his divine voice. The Mother of the gods took up her dwelling at his door. Lastly, we have the famous story of the premonition of his death in dreams—a legend of peculiar significance, when we remember that Pindar, like Sir Thomas Browne, believed that "we are more than ourselves in our sleep," and wrote:

Just before his death, then, Pindar sent to inquire of the oracle of Ammon what was best for man; and the answer, which he had already himself anticipated in his commemoration of Trophonius and Agamedes, was—Death. Meanwhile Persephone appeared to him in his sleep, and told him that he should praise her in her own realm, although on earth he had left her, alone of the blest gods, unsung. Ten days afterwards he died. The hymn which Pindar composed for Persephone in Hades was dictated to a Theban woman by his ghost—so runs the tale—and written down. After his death, Pindar received more than heroic honors. They kept his iron chair at Delphi; and the priest of Phoebus, before he shut the temple gates, cried, "Let Pindar the poet go into the banquet of the god." At Athens his statue was erected at the public cost. At Thebes his house was spared in the ruin of two sieges:

At Rhodes, as we have seen, an ode of his was sculptured on the temple walls of Pallas. Throughout the future, as long as Greek poetry endured, he was known emphatically by the title of ? ???????.

Pindar was famous, as these semi-mythical stories about his infancy and old age indicate, for piety. Unlike Horace, who calls himself Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens, Pindar was a devout and steadfast servant of his country's gods. He dedicated a shrine or at???? near his own house to the Mother of the gods, a statue to Zeus Ammon in Libya, and one to Hermes in the Theban agora. The whole of his poetry is impregnated with a lively sense of the divine in the world. Accepting the religious traditions of his ancestors with simple faith, he adds more of spiritual severity and of mystical morality than we find in Homer. Yet he is not superstitious or credulous. He can afford to criticise the myths like Xenophanes and Plato, refusing to believe that a blessed god could be a glutton. In Pindar, indeed, we see the fine flower of Hellenic religion, free from slavish subservience to creeds and ceremonies, capable of extracting sublime morality from mythical legends, and adding to the old glad joyousness of the Homeric faith a deeper and more awful perception of superhuman mysteries. The philosophical scepticism which in Greece, after the age of Pericles, corroded both the fabric of mythology and the indistinct doctrines of theological monotheism, had scarcely yet begun to act.

Passing to the poetry of Pindar, we have a hard task before us. What can be said adequate to such a theme? What can be left unsaid of the many thoughts that ought to be expressed? At the time of Pindar's youth, lyrical poetry in Greece was sinking into mannerism. He, by the force of his originality, gave it a wholly new direction, and, coming last of the great Dorian lyrists, taught posterity what sort of thing an ode should be. The grand pre-eminence of Pindar as an artist was due in a great measure to his personality. Frigid, austere, and splendid; not genial like that of Simonides, not passionate like that of Sappho, not acrid like that of Archilochus; hard as adamant, rigid in moral firmness, glittering with the strong keen light of snow; haughty, aristocratic, magnificent—the unique personality of the man Pindar, so irresistible in its influence, so hard to characterize, is felt in every strophe of his odes. In his isolation and elevation Pindar stands like some fabled heaven-aspiring peak, conspicuous from afar, girdled at the base with ice and snow, beaten by winds, wreathed round with steam and vapor, jutting a sharp and dazzling outline into cold blue ether. Few things that have life dare to visit him at his grand altitude. Glorious with sunlight and with stars, touched by rise and set of day with splendor, he shines when other lesser heights are dulled. Pindar among his peers is solitary. He had no communion with the poets of his day. He is the eagle; Simonides and Bacchylides are jackdaws. He soars to the empyrean; they haunt the valley mists. Noticing this rocky, barren, severe, glittering solitude of Pindar's soul, critics have not unfrequently complained that his poems are devoid of individual interest. Possibly they have failed to comprehend and appreciate the nature of this sublime and distant genius, whose character, in truth, is just as marked as that of Dante or of Michael Angelo.

Since I have indulged in one metaphor in the vain attempt to enter into some rapport with Pindar, let me proceed to illustrate the Pindaric influence—the impression produced by a sympathetic study of his odes upon the imagination saturated with all that is peculiar in his gorgeous style—by the deliberate expansion of some similes, which are by no means mere ornaments of rhetoric, but illustrations carefully selected from the multitude of images forced upon the mind during a detailed perusal of his poetry. One of the common names for Pindar is the Theban Eagle. This supplies us with the first image, which may be conveyed in the very words of Dante:[107]

This simile describes the rapidity and fierceness of Pindar's spirit, the atmosphere of empyreal splendor into which he bears us with strong wings and clinging talons. Another image may be borrowed from Horace,[108] who says,

likening the poet to a torrent, unrestrained, roaring to the woods and precipices with a thunderous voice. This image does not, like the other, fix our attention upon the quality peculiar to Pindar among all the poets of the world—splendor, fire, the blaze of pure effulgence. But it does suggest another characteristic, which is the stormy violence of his song, that chafes within its limits and seems unable to advance quickly enough in spite of its speed. This violence of Pindar's style, as of some snow-swollen Alpine stream, the hungry Arve or death-cold Lutschine, leaping and raging among granite boulders, has misled Horace into the notion that Pindar's odes are without metrical structure:

whereas we know that, while pursuing his eagle-flight to the sun, or thundering along his torrent-path, Pindar steadily observed the laws of strophe, antistrophe, and epode with consummate art. A third figure may be chosen from Pindar[109] himself.

Then, too, he adds: "With the lyre and with the various voices of flutes[110] I have come with Diagoras across the sea, chanting the wave-born daughter of the Cyprian goddess and the bride of Helios, island Rhodes." In this passage we get a lively impression of some of the marked qualities of Pindar. Reading his poetry is like quaffing wine that bubbles in a bowl of gold. Then, too, there is the picture of the poet, gorgeously attired, with his singing-robes about him, erect upon the prow of a gilded galley, floating through dazzling summer-waves towards the island of his love, Rhodes or Sicily or Ægina. The lyre and the flute send their clear sounds across the sea. We pass temple and citadel on shore and promontory. The banks of oars sweep the flashing brine. Meanwhile the mighty poet stretches forth his golden cup of song to greet the princes and illustrious athletes who await him on the marble quays. Reading Pindar is a progress of this pompous kind. Pindar, as one of his critics remarks, was born and reared in splendor; splendor became his vital atmosphere. The epithet f?????a??, which he gives to Girgenti, suits himself. The splendor-loving Pindar is his name and title for all time. If we search the vocabulary of Pindar to find what phrases are most frequently upon his lips, we shall be struck with the great preponderance of all words that indicate radiance, magnificence, lustre. To Pindar's soul splendor was as elemental as harmony to Milton's. Of the graces, Aglaia must have been his favorite. Nor, love as he did the gorgeousness of wealth, was it mere transitory pomp, the gauds and trappings of the world, which he admired. There must be something to stir the depths of his soul—beauty of person, or perfection of art, or moral radiance, or ideal grandeur. The blaze of real magnificence draws him as the sun attracts the eagle; he does not flit moth-like about the glimmer of mere ephemeral lights.

After these three figures, which illustrate the fiery flight, the torrent-fulness, the intoxicating charm of Pindar, one remains by which the magnetic force and tumult of his poetry may be faintly adumbrated. He who has watched a sunset attended by the passing of a thunderstorm in the outskirts of the Alps; who has seen the distant ranges of the mountains alternately obscured by cloud and blazing with the concentrated brightness of the sinking sun, while drifting scuds of hail and rain, tawny with sunlight, glistening with broken rainbows, clothe peak and precipice and forest in the golden veil of flame-irradiated vapor; who has heard the thunder bellow in the thwarting folds of hills, and watched the lightning, like a snake's tongue, flicker at intervals amid gloom and glory—knows in Nature's language what Pindar teaches with the voice of Art. It is only by a strained metaphor like this that any attempt to realize the Sturm und Drang of Pindar's style can be communicated. In plainer language, Pindar, as an artist, combines the strong flight of the eagle, the irresistible force of the torrent, the richness of Greek wine, the majestic pageantry of Nature in one of her sublimer moods.

Like all the great lyrists of the Dorian school, Pindar composed odes of various species—hymns, prosodia, parthenia, threnoi, scolia, dithyrambs, as well as epinikia. Of all but the epinikian odes we have only inconsiderable fragments left; yet these are sublime and beautiful enough to justify us in believing that Pindar surpassed his rivals in the threnos and the scolion as far as in the epinikian ode. Forty-four of his poems we possess entire—fourteen Olympians, twelve Pythians, eleven Nemeans, seven Isthmians. Of the occasions which led to the composition of these odes something must be said. The Olympian games were held in Elis once in five years, during the summer: their prize was a wreath of wild olive. The Pythian games were held in spring, on the CrissÆan plain, once in five years: their prizes were a wreath of laurel and a palm. The Nemean games were held in the groves of Nemea, near CleonÆ, in Argolis, once in three years: their prize was a wreath of parsley. The Isthmian games were held at Corinth, once in three years: their prize was a wreath of pine, native to the spot. The Olympian festival honored Zeus; that of Pytho, Phoebus; that of Nemea, Zeus; that of the Isthmus, Poseidon. Originally they were all of the nature of a pa??????? or national assembly at the shrine of some deity local to the spot, or honored there with more than ordinary reverence. The Isthmian games in particular retained a special character. Instituted for an Ionian deity, whose rites the men of Elis refused to acknowledge, they failed to unite the whole Greek race. The Greek games, like the Schwing-feste and shooting-matches of Switzerland, served as recurring occasions of reunion and fellowship. Their influence in preserving a Panhellenic feeling was very marked. During the time of the feast, and before and after, for a sufficient number of days, to allow of travellers journeying to and from Olympia and Delphi, hostilities were suspended throughout Hellas; safe-conduct was given through all states to pilgrims. One common feeling animated all the Greeks at these seasons: they met in rivalry, not of arms on the battle-field, but of personal prowess in the lists. And though the various families of the Hellenic stock were never united, yet their games gave them a common object, and tended to the diffusion of national ideas.

Let us pause to imagine the scene which the neighborhood of Olympia must have presented as the great recurring festival of the Greek race approached—a festival in the fullest sense of the word popular, but at the same time consecrated by religion, dignified by patriotic pride, adorned with art. The full blaze of summer is overhead; plain and hill-side yield no shade but what the spare branches of the olive and a few spreading pines afford. Along the road throng pilgrims and deputies, private persons journeying modestly, and public ambassadors gorgeously equipped at the expense of their state. Strangers from Sicily or Cyrene or Magna GrÆcia land from galleys on the coast of Elis. Then there are the athletes with their trainers—men who have been in rude exercise for the prescribed ten months, and whose limbs are in the bloom of manly or of boyish strength. Sages, like Gorgias or Prodicus or Protagoras, are on their way, escorted by bands of disciples, eager to engage each other in debate beneath the porticos of the Olympian Zeus. Thales or Anaxagoras arrives, big with a new theory of the universe. Historians like Herodotus are carrying their scrolls to read before assembled Hellas. Epic poets and rhapsodes are furnished with tales of heroes, freshly coined from their own brains or conned with care from Homer. Rich men bring chariots for racing or display; the more a man spends at Olympia, the more he honors his native city. Women, we need not doubt, are also on the road—HetairÆ from Corinth and Cyprus and Ionia. Sculptors show models of their skill. Potters exhibit new shapes of vases, with scrolls of honeysuckle wreathing round the pictured image of some handsome boy, to attract the eyes of buyers. Painters have their tablets and colors ready. Apart from these more gay and giddy servants of the public taste, are statesmen and diplomatists, plenipotentiaries despatched to feel the pulse of Hellas, negotiators seeking opportunities for safe discussion of the affairs of rival cities. Every active brain, or curious eye, or wanton heart, or well-trained limb, or skilful hand, or knavish wit may find its fit employment here. A mediÆval pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella or St. Thomas of Canterbury was nothing to this exodus of wit in Greece.

As they approached Olympia, a splendid scene burst upon the travellers' eyes—the plain of Elis, rich, deep-meadowed, hoary with olive-trees. One cried to the other, There is the hill of Cronion! There is the grove of Altis! Thither flows Alpheus to the sea! Those white and glittering statues are the portraits of the victors! That temple is the house of everlasting Zeus; beneath its roof sits the Thunderer of Pheidias! Every step made the journey more exciting. By the bed of the Alpheus, tawny in midsummer with dusty oleander-blossoms, the pilgrims passed. At last they enter the precincts of Olympian Zeus: the sacred enclosure is alive with men; the statues among the trees are scarcely more wonder-worthy in their glittering marble than are the bodies of the athletes moving beneath them. The first preoccupation of every Greek who visited Olympia was to see the statue of Zeus. Not to have gazed upon this masterpiece of Pheidias was, according to a Greek proverb, the unhappiness of life. In this, his greatest work, the Athenian sculptor touched the highest point of art, and incarnated the most sublime conception of Greek religious thought. The god was seated on his throne; but, even so, the image rose to the height of forty feet, wrought of pure ivory and gold. At his feet stood figures symbolical of victory in the Olympian games: among them the portrait of Pantarkes, himself a victor, the youth whom Pheidias loved. In designing his great statue the sculptor had in mind those lines of Homer which describe Zeus nodding his ambrosial locks, and shaking Olympus. That he had succeeded in presenting to the eye all that the Greek race could imagine of godlike power and holiness and peace was attested not only by the universal voice of Hellas, but also by the Romans who gazed as conquerors upon the god. Lucius Paulus Æmilius, we are told, after the battle of Pydna, swept Greece, and coming to Olympia, saw the Pheidian Zeus. He shuddered, and exclaimed that he had set mortal eyes upon the deity incarnate. Yet Paulus was a Roman trampling with his legionaries the subject states of fallen Hellas. Cicero proclaimed that Pheidias had copied nothing human, but had carved the ideal image existing in an inspired mind.

Zeus, it must be remembered, was the supreme god of the Aryan race, the purest divinity of the Greek cultus. He was called Father, Sire of gods and men. Therefore his presence in the Panhellenic temple was peculiarly appropriate and awe-inspiring. We may imagine the feelings of an athlete coming to struggle for the fame of his own city, when he first approached this statue in the august Olympian shrine. The games were held at the time of a full moon; through the hypÆthral opening of the temple roof fell the silver rays aslant upon those solemn lineaments, making the glow of ivory and gold more solemn in the dimness of a wondrous gloom.

Presidents chosen from the people of Elis, and named Hellanodikai, awarded the prizes and controlled the conduct of the games. From their decision, in cases of doubt, there was a final appeal to the assembly of Elis. In the morning the heralds opened the lists with this proclamation:[111] "Now begins the contest that dispenses noblest prizes; time tells you to delay no longer." When the runners were ready, the heralds started them with these words, "Put your feet to the line and run." At the end of the day they cried, "Now ceases the contest that dispenses noblest prizes; time tells you to delay no longer." The victor was crowned with wild olive, and led by his friends to the Temple of Zeus. On the way they shouted the old Archilochian chorus, t??e??a ?a??????e, to which Pindar alludes in the beginning of his 9th Olympian: "The song of Archilochus uttered at Olympia, the triple cry of Hail Victorious! was enough to conduct Epharmostus, leading the revel to the Cronian hill with his comrades. But now, from the far-darting bows of the Muses, approach Zeus of the blazing thunder and the holy jutting land of Elis with these mightier shafts." Sacrifice and banquet took place in the evening; and happy was the athlete who, in this supreme moment, was greeted by Pindar with attendant chorus and musicians of the flute and lyre. Three Olympians, which seem to have been composed and chanted on the spot, survive—the 4th, the 8th, the 10th. The proemia to these odes, two of which are remarkably short, indicating the haste in which they had been prepared, sufficiently establish this fact. "Supreme hurler of the thunderbolt that never tires, Zeus! Thy festival recurring with the season brings me with sound of lyre and song to witness august games." "Parent of golden-crowned contests, Olympia, mistress of truth," etc. But it could not be expected that the more elaborate of Pindar's compositions should be ready on such occasions. It usually happened that the victor either found Pindar at Olympia, or sent a message to him at Thebes, and bespoke an ode, adding gifts in accordance with the poet's rank and fame. Then Pindar composed his epinikian, which was sung when the conqueror returned to his own city. The ode would be repeated on successive anniversaries at banquets, sacrificial festivals, and processions in honor of the victory. The ninth Olympian, which has been already quoted, was, for example, sung at a banquet in honor of Epharmostus of Opus, after the altar of Ajax, son of OÏleus, had been crowned. Pindar, as we find from frequent allusions in the odes, had such a press of work that he often delayed sending his poems at the proper time, and had to excuse himself for neglect. In the second Isthmian he records a delay of two years. We may add that he did not disdain to accept money for his toil. In the eleventh Pythian he says: "Muse, it is thy part, since thou hast contracted to give thy voice for gold, to set it going in various ways." In the proemium to the second Isthmian he somewhat bitterly laments the necessity that made him sell his songs:

"The men of old, Thrasybulus, who climbed the chariot of the gold-crowned Muses, and received a famous lyre, lightly shot their arrows of honey-voiced hymns in praise of boys, of him whose beauty kept the summer bloom of youth, that sweetest souvenir of Aphrodite throned in joy. For the Muse as yet loved not gain, nor worked for hire, nor were sweet and tender songs with silvered faces sold by Terpsichore. But now she bids us keep the Argive's speech in mind; and verily it hits the truth—that money, money, money makes the man. He spoke it when deserted of his riches and his friends."