Pindari

“ In short, a modern Pindaric writer compared with Pindar is like a sister among the Camisars compared with Virgil’s Sibyl; there is the distortion, grimace, and outward figure, but nothing of that divine impulse which raises the mind above itself, and makes the sounds more than human. ”

“ The Pindaris were surrounded on all sides by a great army, consisting of 120,000 men and 300 guns, which converged upon them from Bengal, the Deccan and Gujarat under the supreme command of Lord Hastings in person. Sindhia was overawed and forced to sign the treaty of Gwalior, consenting to aid in the extirpation of the Pindaris, whom he had hitherto protected. The Peshwa at Poona, the Bhonsla raja at Nagpur and the army of the infant Holkar each took up arms, but were separately defeated. The Pindaris themselves offered little opposition. ”

“ Since I have indulged in one metaphor in the vain attempt to enter into some rapport with Pindar, let me proceed to illustrate the Pindaric influence—the impression produced by a sympathetic study of his odes upon the imagination saturated with all that is peculiar in his gorgeous style—by the deliberate expansion of some similes, which are by no means mere ornaments of rhetoric [Pg 347] , but illustrations carefully selected from the multitude of images forced upon the mind during a detailed perusal of his poetry. One of the common names for Pindar is the Theban Eagle. ”

“ The Pindāris, as might be expected, were recruited from all classes and castes, and though many became Muhammadans the Hindus preserved the usages of their respective castes. Most of the Hindu men belonged to the Ladul or grass-cutter class, and their occupation was to bring grass and firewood to the camps. “Those born in the Durrahs or camps,” Malcolm states,9 “appear to have been ignorant in a degree almost beyond belief and were in the same ratio superstitious. The women of almost all the Muhammadan Pindāris dressed like Hindus and worshipped Hindu deities. ”

“ While comedy or while tragedy is regarded, his plays are likely to be read; but, except what relates to the stage, I know not that he has ever written a stanza that is sung, or a couplet that is quoted. The general character of his “Miscellanies” is that they show little wit and little virtue. Yet to him it must be confessed that we are indebted for the connection of a national error, and for the cure of our Pindaric madness. He first taught the English writers that Pindar’s odes were regular ”

“ This place is referred to by native historians, and seems to have been situated between Burhānpur and Handiya on the Nerbudda. There is good evidence to prove that large numbers of Pindāris were settled in this part of the country. Mr. Irvine sums up by saying: "If it were not for a passage in Grant Duff (H. of the Mahrattas, Bombay reprint, 157) , I should have been ready to maintain that I had proved my case. My argument requires two things to make it irrefutable: (1) a very early connection between Pandhār and the Pindhāris ”

“ I have ventured to call Pindar the most genuine of the early Greek poets; and in the sense, that his extant works have come down to us on the whole less tampered with and less modernised than any others, I think this is true. In reading Pindar, we feel a well-founded confidence that we have before us the very words of one who lived at a known time and place. In Pindar too we have a poet sui generis. Standing widely apart from,—we can hardly say between,—the epic on one side and the dramatic on the other,—the lyric poetry of Pindar has the impress of a peculiar and quite unique genius. ”

“ Pindar was of a noble family, of the house of the Aigeidai, and it is probable that his kinsmen, or some of them, may have taken the side of oligarchy in the often recurring dissensions at Thebes, but of this we know nothing certain. He himself seems to have taken no part in politics. When he speaks on the subject in his odes it is not with the voice of a partizan. An ochlocracy is hateful to him, but if he shows himself an 'aristocrat' it is in the literal and etymological meaning of the word. ”

“ The admonitions which Pindar addresses to Hiero are to cultivate a calm serenity of mind, after the cares and toils by which he had founded and extended his empire, and to purify and ennoble by poetry a spirit which had been ruffled by unworthy passions. Even when the skill of the victor is put in the foreground, Pindar in general does not content himself with celebrating this bodily prowess alone, but he usually adds some moral virtue which the victor has shown, or which he recommends and extols. ”

“ Against God it is not meet to strive, who now upholdeth these, and now again to those giveth great glory. But not even this cheereth the heart of the envious; for they measure by an unjust balance, and their own hearts they afflict with bitter pain, till such time as they attain to that which their hearts devise.
To take the car's yoke on one's neck and run on lightly, this helpeth; but to kick against the goad is to make the course perilous. Be it mine to dwell among the good, and to win their love.
↑ Pindar here identifies himself with his ode, which he sent, not took, to Syracuse. ”

“ And certain obvious merits and characteristics of his poetry were pointed out by every professor of literature in the schools of Greece or Rome, and furnished a supply of materials for a panegyric, which any writer who chose could work up and expand at pleasure. But we find nothing to make us believe that Pindar was widely read among men of average culture among the ancients. When a poet is really popular in any age, the general literature of the age is certain to supply proofs of his popularity. ”

“ Glorious with sunlight and with stars, touched by rise and set of day with splendor, he shines when other lesser lights are dulled. Pindar among his peers is solitary. He had no communion with the poets of his day. He is the eagle; Simonides and Bacchyl'ides are jackdaws. He soars to the empyrean; they haunt the valley mists. Noticing this rocky, barren, severe, glittering solitude of Pindar's soul, critics have not infrequently complained that his poems are devoid of individual interest. ”

“ His fame flew east and west, north and south, from Rhodes to Sicily, and from Thessaly to Cyrene on the far-off coast of Africa. The royal families of Agrigentum and Syracuse supplied him with liberal patrons, and he is believed to have been more than once received as an honoured guest in the palace of Hiero, who for eleven years, from B.C. 478 to B.C. 467, reigned in the latter city. Throughout this period, and for about ten years after it, Pindar's genius appears at its greatest height. ”

“ Any one who attempts to render Pindar, with tolerable closeness, into readable English, will soon find that he has undertaken an extremely difficult, not to say a formidable task. It would be hard to conceive any two forms of literature more widely different than the chivalrous, sententious, highly florid style of the Greek lyric poet, and the average prose-writings of our own times and country. If we try to translate a dozen lines of Pindar very literally, and word for word, we shall too often obtain a result that reads very like downright nonsense. ”

“ Practically, then, our evidence for the facts of Pindar's life consists of four biographies, compiled fully fourteen hundred years after the poet's death, and forming the latest links in a chain of tradition which cannot be traced beyond the school of Aristotle. It is impossible to accept such evidence without hesitation; but we have, in fact, no other. At least we may receive it as evidence, if not to the actual facts of Pindar's life, yet to the general impression produced by that life on the minds of succeeding generations. ”

“ The same defect which we feel more or less present in all poets of antiquity—least of all perhaps in Virgil and Sophokles, but even in them somewhat—a certain want of widely sympathetic tenderness, this is unquestionably present in Pindar. What of this quality may have found expression in his lost poems, especially the Dirges, we can scarcely guess, but in his triumphal odes it hardly appears at all, unless in the touches of tender gracefulness into which he softens when speaking of the young. ”

“ Generally, indeed, in extolling both the skill and fortune of the victor, Pindar appears to adhere to the truth as faithfully as he declares himself to do; nor is he ever betrayed into a high flown style of panegyric. A republican dread of incurring the censure of his fellow citizens, as well as an awe of the divine Nemesis, induced him to moderate his praises, and to keep in view the instability of human fortune and the narrow limits of human strength. ”

“ In the Tenth Pythian, Pindar has been saying that a man who is at once a conqueror and the father of a conqueror has attained the summit of human happiness. What matters it, he cries, that there are further heights which he can never scale; that he cannot climb the brazen heaven, or reach the Paradise beyond the pole, the happy country of the Hyperboreans? And then he tells the legend of the hero Perseus, who had foimd the wondrous way to that mysterious region. ”

“ In Pindar, passing from Ibycus and Anacreon, we ascend at once into a purer and more healthful atmosphere, fraught, indeed, with passion and pregnant with storm, but no longer simply sensual. Taken as a whole, the Odes of Pindar, composed for the most part in the honour of young men and boys, both beautiful and strong, are the work of a great moralist as well as a great artist. ”

“ These tales, which are very numerous, and told with admirable spirit, form the most pleasing part of Pindar's works. It must be admitted that they have sometimes the appearance of being as it were dragged in; but the explanation is very simple: the poet's object was to praise not only the victor but his clan, or even his city; and to do this in a manner most pleasing to them he was compelled to dwell on the local or family legends, nearly all of which turn on some supernatural proofs of favour, or on a more or less remote descent from the gods. ”

“ As a poet correctly describes him, using one of the names commonly applied to him,
Pindar, that eagle, mounts the skies,
While virtue leads the noble way.
—PRIOR.
The poems of Pindar were numerous, and comprised triumphal odes, hymns to the gods, pæans, dirges, and songs of various kinds. His triumphal odes alone have come down to us entire; but of some of his other compositions there are a few sublime and beautiful fragments. ”

“ Pindar, however, was not a common mercenary poet, always ready to sing the praises of him whose bread he ate. He received indeed money and presents for his poems, according to the general usage previously introduced by Simonides; yet his poems are the genuine expression of his thoughts and feelings. In his praises of virtue and good fortune, the colours which he employs are not too vivid; nor does he avoid the darker shades of his subject; he often suggests topics of consolation for past and present evil, and sometimes warns and exhorts to avoid future calamity. ”

“ Locks of grey full often grow,
Ere the appointed time!"
Camarina, it will be remembered, had lately been repeopled by the expelled adherents of Hiero's dynasty at Syracuse (B.C. 461) ; thus, then, in the Fifth Ode, Pindar describes the new houses rising on the banks of the Hipparis, and constructed of logs brought downstream from the interior. The river-god, says the poet, builds and blesses the city—
"Hipparis, that waters all thy host with honoured urns,
Gathering a stately forest round his banks of storied homes,—
Guided of whose grace thy people fast from dearth to glory comes!" ”

“ Had it been otherwise how passionately pure would Pindar's joy have uttered itself when the 'stone of Tantalos' that hung over the head of Hellas was smitten into dust in that greatest crisis of the fortunes of humanity. He exults nobly as it is, he does all honour to Athens, 'bulwark of Hellas,' but the shame of his own city, his 'mother' Thebes, must have caused him a pang as bitter as a great soul has ever borne. ”

“ I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a Greek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going to abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well perhaps—I think, at any rate, it would do no harm—if he did know a little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar. ”

“ This legend embodies the first premiss of Pindar's syllogism. The rule of the Euphemids in Cyrenè is no usurped and brutal tyranny, but a legitimate and law-abiding sovereignty, sanctioned and ordained by Heaven. Next we have the myth of Jason, the central idea of which furnishes the poet with his second premiss—that true kingship exhibits itself not in violence, but in a certain winning grace and gentleness, which secure to the true-born ruler influence over his fellow-men and favour from the gods. ”

“ Pindar may be called in some respects an exceptional poet. Partly from the difficulty and somewhat archaic character of the Greek, partly from his highly figurative and "flowery" style, but chiefly from the nature of his subject, which is not human nature but human glory, he is not very extensively read in this country, nor perhaps by any but by students of the higher class; and with them he is not commonly a great favourite. The fact is, that Pindar, to use a hackneyed phrase, must be known to be appreciated. ”