Normally the philosophy of one age is the literature of the next: the ideas and issues that in one generation are fought out on the field of research and speculation provide in the succeeding generation the background of dram;, fiction, and poetry. But in Greece the literature did not lag behind the philwophy; the poets were themselves philosophers, did their own thinking, and were in the intellectual vanguard of their time. That same conflict between conservatism and radicalism which agitated Greek religion, science, and philosophy sound expression also in poetry and drama, even in the writing of history. Since excellence of artistic form was added, in Greek letters, to depth of speculativethought, the literature of the Golden Age reached heights never touched againuntil the days of Shakespeare and 1lontaigne.

Beeause of this burden of thought, and the decay of royal or aristocratic patronage, the fifth century was less rich than the sixth in lyric poetry as an independent art. Pindar is the transition between the two periods: he inherits the lyric form, but fills it with dramatic magnificence; after him poetry breaks through its traditional limits, and, in the Dionvsian drama, combines with religiin, music, and the dance to make a greater vehicle for the splendor and passion of the Golden Age.

Pindar came of a Theban family that traced its lineage back to primitive times, and claimed to include many of the ancient heroes commemorated in his verse. His uncle, an accomplished flutist, passed down to Pindar much of his love or music, and something of his skill. For advanced musical instruction the parents sent the boy to Atlicns, where Lasus and Agathocles taught him choral comiosition. Before he was twenty – i.e., by 507 – he returned to Thebes, and studied with the poetess Corinna. Five times he competed against Corinna in pubic song, and five times was beaten; but Corinna was very pleasing to behold and the judges were men. Pindar called her a sow, Simonides a crow, himself an eagle. Despite this myopia his reputation rose so high that his fellow Thebans soon concocted a story that told how once, as the young poet slept in the fields, some bees had settled upon his lips, and had left their honey there. Soon he was handsomely commissioned to write odes in honor of princes and rich men; he was the guest of noble families in Rhodes, Tenedos, Corinth, and Athens, and for a time lived as royal bard at the courts of Alexander I of Macedon, Theron of Acragas, and Hieron I of Syracuse. Usually his songs were paid for in advance, very much as if a city should in our days engage a composer to celebrate it with an original composition for chorus and dance, and to conduct the performance himself. When Pindar returned to Thebes, towards his forty-fourth year, he was acclaimed as Boeotia's greatest gift to Greece.

He worked painstakingly, composing the music for each poem, and often training a chorus to sing it. He wrote hymns and paeans for deities, dithyrambs for the festivals of Dionysus, parthenaia for maidens, enkomia for celebrities, skolia for banquets, threnoi, or dirges, for funerals, and epinikia, or songs of victory, for winners at the Panhellenic competitions. Of all these only forty-five odes remain, named after the games whose heroes they honored. Of these odes, again, only the words survive, none of the music; in judging them, we are in the position of some future historian who, having the librettos of Wagner's operas but nothing of the scores, should list him as a poet rather than a composer, and should rank him by the words that once attended upon his harmonies. Or if we picture some Chinese scholar, unfamiliar with Christian story, reading in one evening, in lame translation, ten Bach chorals divorced from their music and ritual, we shall measure our justice to Pindar. When read today, ode after ode, in the silence of the study, he is beyond comparison the dreariest outpost in the classical landscape.

Only the analogy of music can explain the structure of these poems. To Pindar, as to Simonides and Bacchylides, the form to be followed in an epinician ode was as compulsory as sonata form in the sonatas and symphonies of modern Europe. First came the statement of the theme – the name and story of the athlete who had gained the prize, or of the nobleman whose horses had drawn their chariot to victory. In general Pindar celebrates "the wisdom of man, and his beauty, and the splendor of his fame." In truth he was not much interested in his formal subject; he sang in praise of runners, courtesans, and kings, and was willing to accept any promptly paving tyrant as a patron saint if the occasion gave scope to his rich imagination and his proudly intricate verse. His topic might be anything from a mule race to the glory of Greek civilization in all its variety and spread. He was loyal to Thebes, and not more inspired than the Delphic oracle when he defended Theban neutrality in the Persian War; but later he was ashamed of his error, and went out of his way to praise the leader of the Greek defense as "renowned Athens, rich, violet-crowned, worthy of song, bulwark of Hellas, god-protected city." The Athenians are said to have given him ten thousand drachmas ($l0,000) for the dithyrambs, or processional song, in which these lines occurred; Thebes, we are less reliably informed, fined him for his implied reproof, and Athens paid the fine

The second part of a Pindaric ode was a selection from Greek mythology. Here Pindar was discouragingly lavish; as Corinna complained, he "sowed with the whole sack rather than with the hand." He had a high conception of the gods, and honored them as among his best clients. He was the favorite poet of the Delphic priesthood; during his life he received many privileges from them, and after his death his spirit was, with Caledonian generosity, invited to share in the first fruits offered at Apollo's shrine. He was the last defender of the orthodox faith; even the pious Aeschylus seems wildly heretical beside him; Pindar would have been horrified by the blasphemies of Prometheus Bound. Sometimes he rises to an almost monotheistic conception of Zeus as "the All, governing all things and seeing all things." He is a friend of the Mysteries, and siares the Orphic hope of paradise. He preaches the divine origin and destiny of the individual soul,' and offers one of the earliest descriptions of a Last ludgment, a Heaven, and a Hell. "Immediately after death the lawless spirits suffer punishment, and the sins committed in this realm of Zeus are judged by One who passeth sentence stern and inevitable."

But in sunshine ever fair
Abide the good, and all their nights and days
An equal splendor wear.
And never as of old with thankless toil
For their poor empty needs they vex the soil,
And plough the watery seas;
But dwelling with the glorious gods in ease
A tearless life they pass,
Whose joy on earth it was
To keep their plighted word. But, far from these,
Torments the rest sustain too dark for human gaze.

 

The third and concluding section of a Pindaric ode was usually a word of moral counsel. We must not expect any subtle philosophy here; Pindar was no Athenian, and had probably never met or read a Sophist; his intellect was consumed in his art, and no force remained for original thought. He was satisfied to urge his victorious athletes or princes to be modest in their success, and to show respect for the gods, their fellow men, and their own best selves. Now and then he mingled reproof with praise, and dared to warn Hieron against greed; but neither was he afraid to say a kind word for that most maligned and oved of all goods – money. He abhorred the revolutionists of Sicily, and wanted them almost in the words of Confucius: "Even for the feeble it is an easy thing to shake a city to its foundation, but it is a sore struggle to set it in its Face again." He liked the moderate democracy of Athens after Salamis, but sincerely believed aristocracy to be the least harmful of all forms of government. Ability, he thought, lies in the blood rather than in schooling, and tends to appear in families that have shown it before. Only good blood can prepare a man for those rare deeds that ennoble and justify human life. "Things of a day! What are we and what not? A dream about a shadow is man; yet when some god-given splendor falls, a glory of light comes over him, and his life is sweet."

Pindar was not popular in his lifetime, and for some centuries yet he will continue to enjoy the lifeless immortality of those writers whom all men praise and no one reads. While the world was moving forward he asked it to stand still, and it left him so far behind that though younger than Aeschylus he seems older than Alcman. He wrote a poetry as compact, involved, and devious as Tacitus' prose, in an artificial and deliberately archaic dialect of his own, in meters so elaborate that few poets have ever cared to follow them, and so varied that only two of the forty-five odes have the same metrical form. He is so obscure, despite the naivete of his thought, that grammarians spend a lifetime unraveling his Teutonic constructions, only to find, beneath them, a mine of sonorous platitudes. If despite these faults, and his frigid formality, and turgid metaphors, and tiresome mythology, some curious scholars are still persuaded to read him, it is because his narratives are swift and vivid, his simple morality is sincere, and the splendor of his language lifts to a passing grandeur even the humblest themes.