Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

"For Cleander and his prime of beauty let some one, O ye youths, bear the glorious meed of toil to the splendid portals of his sire Telesarchus, the revel-song, which pays him for his Isthmian victory and for his might in Nemean games. For him I too, though grieved in soul, am asked to call upon the golden Muse. Freed as we are from mighty griefs, let us not fall into the bereavement of victorious crowns, nor nurse our cares; but ceasing from vain sorrows, spread we honeyed song abroad thus after our great trouble: forasmuch as of a truth some god hath turned aside the stone of Tantalus which hung above our heads—intolerable suffering for Hellas. Me verily the passing away of dread hath cured not of all care; yet it is ever better to notice what is present: for treacherous time is hung above the lives of men, rolling the torrent of their days. Still, with freedom on our side, men can cure even these evils; and it is our duty to attend to wholesome hope."

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:

All by happy fate attain
The end that frees them from their pain;
And the body yields to death,
But the shape of vital breath
Still in life continueth;
It alone is heaven's conferring:
Sleeps it when the limbs are stirring.
But when they sleep, in many dreams it shows
The coming consummation both of joys and woes.[106]

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 Phœbus, 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:

Lift not thy spear against the Muse's bower;
The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground.

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 ὁ λυρικός.

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 ματρῶον 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.