[101] The dramatic art was hereditary among the Athenians. Æschylus left a son, Euphorion, and two nephews, Philocles and Astydamas, who produced tragedies. The last is reported to have written no fewer than two hundred and forty plays. Iophon, the son, and Sophocles, the grandson, of the great Sophocles, were dramatists of some repute at Athens. Euripides had a nephew of his own name, and Aristophanes two sons who followed the same calling. It is only from families like the Bachs that we can draw any modern parallel to this transmission of an art from father to son in the same race.
[102] The reputation gained by Simonides among the ancients for the sorrow of his song is proved by the phrase of Catullus,—"Mœstius lachrymis Simonideis" (more sad than tears shed by Simonides).
[103] See Bergk, vol. iii. pp. 1128, 1129, 1132, 1227.
CHAPTER XI.
PINDAR.
His Life.—Legends connected with him.—The Qualities of his Poetry.—The Olympic Games.—Pindar's Professional Character.—His Morality.—His Religious Belief.—Doctrine of a Future State.—Rewards and Punishments.—The Structure of his Odes.—The Proemia to his Odes.—His Difficulty and Tumidity of Style.
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—Θήβα μᾶτερ ἐμά. 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 τῇ χειρὶ δεῖν σπείρειν, ἀλλὰ μὴ ὅλῳ τῷ θυλάκῳ—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—
μέμφομη δὲ κὴ λιγούραν Μούρτιδ' ἱώνγα
ὅτι βάνα φοῦσ' ἔβα Πινδάροιο ποτ' ἔριν.
"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 ἔρεισμα Ἕλλαδος (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: