Pindar — Olympian Odes

notes

Pindar of Thebes (c. 518–438 BCE) was regarded by ancient Greeks and Romans as the greatest of the choral lyric poets. Only his epinician odes — the odes celebrating victories in the four Panhellenic athletic festivals (Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, Isthmian) — survive intact, in four books ordered by festival. Numerous other works (paeans, dithyrambs, hymns, encomia) are lost or survive only in fragments. Each ode was composed on commission from a specific victor (or his family), for performance at the celebratory banquet after the games. But the odes are far more than praise poems. Pindar characteristically uses the victor's triumph as a starting-point for extended myth (the victor's family history, the founding myth of his city, mythological parallels to his achievement) and for meditation on the human condition — the fragility of mortal glory, the necessity of proper piety and gratitude, the uncertainty of fortune. Pindar's Greek is notoriously difficult, densely metaphorical and grammatically compressed. His style influenced Horace's Odes and, through the "Pindaric Ode" of English poetry (Ben Jonson, Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth), the whole tradition of the sublime ode in European verse. The closing formulation of Pythian VIII — "man is a dream of a shadow" (skias onar anthropos) — is one of the most-quoted definitions of the human condition in ancient literature. Translation: Ernest Myers, "The Extant Odes of Pindar," London: Macmillan, 1874. Public domain.

related texts