Pindar

Pindar (518 BC – 438 BC) was a Boeotian poet, counted as one of the nine lyric poets of Greece. The only works of his to have survived complete are a series of odes written to celebrate the victors in athletic games.

Greek text cited from H. Maehler, Pindarus. Carmina cum fragmentis, vols. I–II (Berlin, ⁸1987–1989).
Translations cited from R. Stoneman, The Odes and Selected Fragments (London: Everyman Library, 1997), unless otherwise noted.

Olympian I (476 BC)

• ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, ὁ δὲ χρυσὸς αἰθόμενον πῦρ
  ἅτε διαπρέπει νυκτὶ μεγάνορος ἔξοχα πλούτου.
  • Best blessing of all is water,
    And gold like a fiery flame gleaming at night,
    Supreme amidst the pride of lordly wealth.
  • Ol. I.1–2
    • Alternate translation:
    • Best is water, but gold stands out blazing like fire
      at night beyond haughty wealth.

• ἁμέραι δ᾿ ἐπίλοιποι
  μάρτυρες σοφώτατοι.
  • Days to come will prove the surest witness.
  • Ol. I.33–34

• εἰ δὲ θεὸν ἀνήρ τις ἔλπεταί
  ⟨τι⟩ λαθέμεν ἔρδων, ἁμαρτάνει.
  • But if a man shall hope in aught he does
    To escape the eyes of god, he makes an error.
  • Ol. I.63–64

• ὁ μέγας δὲ κίν-
  δυνος ἄναλκιν οὔ φῶτα λαμβάνει.
  • Great danger
    Calls to no coward's heart.
  • Ol. I.81–82

Olympian II (476 BC)

• σοφὸς ὁ πολλὰ εἰδὼς φυᾷ.
  • Whoever knows many things
    By nature is a poet.
  • Ol. II.86; the Greek simply says: "wise is one who knows much by nature," but σοφός is Pindar's usual word for poet.
    • Alternate translation:
    • Inborn of nature's wisdom
      The poet's truth.

Pythian II (475 BC?)

• γένοι᾿, οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών.
  • Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
  • Pyth. II.72
    • Alternate translations:
    • Be what you know you are.
    • Be true to thyself now that thou hast learnt what manner of man thou art.
    • Having learned, become who you are.

Pythian III (474 BC?)

• μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον
  σπεῦδε, τὰν δ᾿ ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν.
  • Do not yearn, O my soul, for immortal life!
    Use to the utmost
    the skill that is yours.
  • Pyth. III.61–62
    • Alternate translation:
    • Seek not, my soul, immortal life, but make the most of the resources that are within your reach.

Pythian VIII (446 BC)

• ἐπάμεροι· τί δέ τις; τί δ᾿ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ
  ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ᾿ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ,
  λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπεστιν ἀνδρῶν καὶ μείλιχος αἰών.
  • Creatures of a day! What is a man?
    What is he not? A dream of a shadow
    Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men
    A gleam of splendour given of Heaven,
    Then rests on them a light of glory
    And blessèd are their days.
  • Pyth. VIII.95–97
    • Alternate translation (R. S. Thomas, 1985):
    • Man is a dream about a shadow.
      But when some splendour falls upon him from God,
      a glory comes to him and his life is sweet.

Nemean IV (473 BC?)

• ῥῆμα δ᾿ ἐργμάτων χρονιώτερον βιοτεύει.
  • For words
    Live longer down the years than deeds.
  • Nem. IV.6

Nemean V (483 BC?)

• οὔ τοι ἅπασα κερδίων
  φαίνοισα πρόσωπον ἀλάθει᾿ ἀτρεκές·
  καὶ τὸ σιγᾶν πολλάκις ἐστὶ σοφώ-
      τατον ἀνθρώπῳ νοῆσαι.
  • Here profits not
    To tell the whole truth with clear face unveiled.
    Often is man's best wisdom to be silent.
  • Nem. V.18–21

Nemean XI (446 BC?)

• ἀλλὰ βροτῶν τὸν μὲν κενεόφρονες αὖχαι
  ἐξ ἀγαθῶν ἔβαλον· τὸν δ᾿ αὖ καταμεμφθέντ᾿ ἄγαν
  ἰσχὺν οἰκείων παρέσφαλεν καλῶν
  χειρὸς ἕλκων ὀπίσσω θυμὸς ἄτολμος ἐών.
  • But among mortals the one is deprived of success by empty boasting, so another, too much distrustful of his strength, fails to secure the honours that rightfully belong to him, being dragged backward by a spirit deficient in daring.
  • Nem. XI.29–32 (tr. C. T. Ramage, 1873)

• γλυκὺ δὲ πόλεμος ἀπείροισιν, ἐμπείρων δέ τις
  ταρβεῖ προσιόντα νιν καρδίᾳ περισσῶς.
  • War is sweet to those who have no experience of it,
    but the experienced man trembles exceedingly at heart on its approach.
  • Fr. 110
  • Alternate translations:
  • War is sweet to them that know it not.
  • War is sweet to those not acquainted with it
  • War is sweet to those who do not know it.
  • War is sweet to those that never have experienced it.
  • War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

This phrase is the origin of the Latin proverb "Dulce bellum inexpertis" which is sometimes misattributed to Desiderius Erasmus‎.

• θνᾴσκει δὲ σιγαθὲν καλὸν ἔργον.
  • A good deed hidden in silence dies.
  • Fr. 121

• ἀνδρῶν δικαίων Χρόνος σωτὴρ ἄριστος.
  • Time is the best preserver of righteous men.
  • Fr. 159

• Νόμος ὁ πάντων βασιλεύς
  θνατῶν τε καὶ ἀθανάτων.
  • Law, the king of all mortals and immortals.
  • Fr. 169a.1–2

• His innate, unquestioning pride in his poetical mission means that he gives to it all his gifts and all his efforts. The result is a poetry that by any standards deserves the name because it is based on a radiant vision of reality and fashioned with so subtle, so adventurous, and so dedicated an art that it is worthy to be an earthly counterpart of the songs which Apollo and the Muses sing on Olympus, and which Pindar regards as the archetype of music on those lofty occasions when all discords are resolved and all misgivings obliterated by the power of the life-giving word.
  • Maurice Bowra, Pindar (1964), p. 401

• The association between the agon and the aristocratic made it possible for individual families to cherish a tradition of competing and winning. Such families of champions were Pindar's best customers, and it is from him that we learn of them; he is our indispensable informant on the competitive spirit.
  • Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization (1998), p. 170

• Of Greek poets only one, Pindar, expressed the full range of ideals which achieved so much prominence in the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century. The themes of military victory, national glory, personal triumph and emancipation linked with the freedom of the community were enforced in Pindar with a 'vehement intensity' which spoke to the new aesthetic; and in England the first poet to respond to these widening opportunities was Gray.
  • J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (1994), p. 252

• Pindar is austere. Splendor can be cold, and Pindar glitters but never warms. He is hard, severe, passionless, remote, with a kind of haughty magnificence. He never steps down from his frigid eminence. Aristocrats did not stoop to lies, and his pen would never deviate from the strict truth in praising any triumph. He would glorify a victor so far as he was really glorious, but no further. As he himself puts it, he would not tell "a tale decked out with dazzling lies against the worth of truth." Only what was in actual fact nobly praiseworthy would be praised by him.
  • Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way to Western Civilization (1930; 1942), p. 98

• He began his poetical career at the age of twenty, with an ode on a Thessalian youth's victory in the games. He grew to be the national lyrist of Greece. It is a sign of the coming time that he also pays his homage to Athens,—"the bulwark of Hellas," the city that "laid the foundation of freedom."
  • Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Greek Literature (1877), p. 65

• Pindar usually takes some heroic legend or group of legends connected with the victor or the victor's city, and makes this his main theme... In treating the legends, Pindar aims especially at bringing out their moral, and applying this to the victor or his city. If we wish to understand Pindar's place among his contemporaries, we must never forget how closely these legends which he interpreted were bound up with Greek religion, and with the belief of Greek cities and great Greek families about their own origin.
  • Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Greek Literature (1877), pp. 67-68

• The loss of the music by which Pindar's Odes were accompanied deprives us of an indispensable aid to the comprehension of their effect as works of art. And, if the music were extant, modern imagination would still have to supply the scenic accessories of a gorgeous festival, the light, the colour, the movement, the glowing sympathy of a brilliant audience with the newly won or freshly remembered victory which shed a reflected lustre on the victor's native city, the thrill of patriotic pride responding to each allusion, faint or dark, perhaps, for us, that touched some household word of inherited renown, the sense of deepened spiritual life with which Greeks for whom the faith of their fathers was still a vital force heard the secret lessons of divine lore drawn forth by that great poet of all Greece in whom the priests of the Delphian Apollo revered the full inspiration of their god. Pindar's achievement cannot be measured by a literary criticism of his text. The glory of his song has passed for ever from the world with the sound of the rolling harmonies on which it once was borne, with the splendour of rushing chariots and athletic forms around which it threw its radiance, with the white-pillared cities by the Aegean or Sicilian sea in which it wrought its spell, with the beliefs or joys which it ennobled; but those who love his poetry, and who strive to enter into its high places, can still know that they breathe a pure and bracing air, and can still feel vibrating through a clear calm sky the strong pulse of the eagle's wings as he soars with steady eyes against the sun.
  • Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Greek Literature (1877), p. 68

• Pindar was a lyric poet of vehement intensity. His principal surviving works are epinikia, choral odes to be sung in honour of victories at the athletic festivals. In them he expressed attitudes which, however conventional or unoriginal at the time, had much in common with the new outlook of the Romantics. His themes are glory, beauty, nobility, freedom: the glory of athletic prowess, family achievement, the beauty of physical perfection, the nobility of breeding or heroism, the great gestures, such as Hiero's victory over the Etruscans or the Athenian victories in the Persian Wars, which secured national freedom.
  • Robert Maxwell Ogilvie, Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918 (1964), p. 85

• Goethe and Holderlin in Germany were obsessed by the power of Pindar—Goethe ranked him second only to Homer—and composed lyrics which echo much of the Pindaric spirit. In England Gray was the first to respond to the call. His Pindaric odes, with their urgency and passion, foreshadow bolder flights that were to come. Shelley's Ode to Naples is divided into ten irregular stanzas marked epode, strophe and antistrophe and characterized by the lively transitions and unrestrained imagery of Pindar. The Ode to the West Wind and Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality stand in the same tradition. The suitability and appeal of Pindar penetrated to the schools and Universities.
  • Robert Maxwell Ogilvie, Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918 (1964), p. 86

• Novem vero lyricorum longe Pindarus princeps spiritu, magnificentia, sententiis, figuris, beatissima rerum verborumque copia et velut quodam eloquentiae flumine: propter quae Horatius eum merito nemini credit imitabilem.
  • Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is far the greatest, for inspiration, magnificence, sententiae, Figures, a rich stock of ideas and words, and a real flood of eloquence; Horace rightly thinks him inimitable for these reasons.
  • Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, X.1.61 (tr. D. A. Russell, 2002)

• Works by Pindar at Project Gutenberg
• Selected odes, marked to show selected rhetorical and poetic devices
• Olympian 1, read aloud in Greek, with text and English translation provided
• Pythian 3, translated by Frank J. Nisetich
• Pindar by Gregory Cran, at the Perseus Project
• Pindar's Life by Basil L. Gildersleeve
• Words in blood, like flowers: philosophy and poetry, music and eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Heidegger by Babette E. Babich.