Pindaric ode

“ To smut your paper, or defile your Muse.
Your gayest things, as well express'd as meant,
Are equally both quaint and innocent.
50But your Pindaric Odes indeed are such
That Pindar's lyre from his own skilful touch
Ne'er yielded such an harmony, nor yet
Verse keep such time on so unequal feet.
So by his own generous confession
Great Tasso by Guarini was outdone:
And (which in copying seldom does befall)
The ectype's better than th' original. ”

“ It is as much commendation as a man can bear, to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry. Since Pindar was the prince of lyric [Pg 282] poets, let me have leave to say, that, in imitating him, our numbers should, for the most part, be lyrical: for variety, or rather where the majesty of thought requires it, they may be stretched to the English heroick of five feet, and to the French Alexandrine of six. But the ear must preside, and direct the judgment to the choice of numbers. Without the nicety of this, the harmony of Pindaric verse can never be complete ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Connected with this peculiarity of Pindar's is another, the practice of continually alluding to myths without working out their incidents. Thus he delays the development of his main legend to touch by the way on a dozen others; or he begins a story, and then drops it with some allusion to the necessary limits of his Ode, or even with no excuse at all. Sometimes, before commencing his real theme, he affects to hesitate in his choice of a subject—he speaks like the victim of an embarras de richesse. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We gather from the first strophe that Pindar was engaged at the time to write an ode in honour of the Delian Apollo to be sung at Keos, but that he put this off in order first to write the present ode in honour of a victory won for his own native state of Thebes.
* * * * *
O mother, Thebe of the golden shield, thy service will I set even above the matter that was in my hand. May rocky Delos, whereto I am vowed, be not therefore wroth with me. Is there aught dearer to the good than noble parents? ”

“ 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. ”

“ When Pindar depreciates the singer who is a mere pupil of others; when he says that "one training will not form us all," or lift the uninspired man to the heights of poetry; may he not be hinting that the young Bacchylides—a new competitor for Sicilian laurels—was only a feeble echo of Simonides? In an ode written for Hiero in 474 B.C. Pindar expresses the hope of "surpassing rivals" (ἀμεύσασθ' ἀντίους, Pyth. i. 45) : he touches on the baneful power of envy and slander,—but adds, "yet forego not noble aims ”

“ The dark and joyless life of death,
And half—to reign in heaven."— (S.)
"No doubt," says Pindar, "clouded the hero's mind." In an instant his choice was made, and forthwith
"From Castor fell
From eye and tongue the prison-bonds of hell."— (S.)
So ends this charming legend of fraternal affection, and with it the Ode reaches a worthy close.
Among Pindar's more important Odes must be reckoned also the Ninth Olympian, addressed to Epharmostus, a Locrian of Opus in Northern Greece. Pour distinct Greek communities bore the name of Locrians, three in Greece proper and one in Italy. ”

“ One slight effort of Pindar's juvenile muse has also escaped the ravages of time, but not sufficiently considerable to have served, like Pope's Ode on Solitude, or Cowley's Constantia and Philetus, as a presage of that future excellence which placed him, when he had attained his fortieth year, in the first rank of the lyric poets of Greece.
The encomiums which our poet often lavishes on the wealthy have sometimes been mentioned as a subject of reproach ”

“ 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. ”

“ Custom, my Lord, that sovereign arbiter, from whose decision in literary as well as in civil causes, there frequently lies no appeal, will lead us to consider boldness of transition as a circumstance which is peculiarly characteristic of the Ode. Lyric Poets have in all ages appropriated to themselves the liberty of indulging imagination in her most irregular excursions; and when a digression is remotely similar to the subject, they are permitted to fall into it at any time by the invariable practice of their Predecessors. Pindar expressly lays claim to this privilege. ”

“ In Pindar's frequent insistence on the supreme value of song as the record of great deeds we can sometimes feel a tacit reference to the art with which here he openly contrasts his own. Such princes as the Syracusan Hiero were patrons alike of poet and of sculptor. Without imagining any rivalry in a jealous or sordid sense, we can understand how a poet, conscious that his work possessed the secret of unfading youth, should have been impelled to claim for it a permanence so much less obvious to the many in his own day than that of the marbles which seemed to have made the victory immortal. ”

“ Pindar made the arts of poetry and music the business of his life, and his fame soon spread throughout Greece and the neighboring countries. He excelled in all the known varieties of choral poetry, but the only class of poems that enable us to judge of his general style is his triumphal odes. When a victory was gained in a contest at a festival by the speed of horses, the strength and dexterity of the human body, or by skill in music, such a victory, which shed honor not only on the victor, but also on his family, and even on his native city, demanded a public celebration. ”

“ The originality and splendor of Pindar are most noticeable in the openings of his odes—the proemia, as they are technically called. It would appear that he possessed an inexhaustible storehouse of radiant imagery, from which to draw new thoughts for the commencement of his poems. In this region, which most poets find but barren, he displayed the fullest vigor and fertility of fancy. Sometimes, but rarely, the opening is simple, as in the second Olympian: "Hymns that rule the lyre! what god, what hero, what man shall we make famous?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ To Æacus' high fane 'twas his the wreaths to bear.
↑ The opening of this ode contains an indirect reproach of the kindred of Pytheas, who wished to procure from Pindar an ode to commemorate his victory for a less sum than three drachmæ, (about ten pounds,) asserting that it would be preferable to purchase a statue for that sum: but afterward, sensible of their error, they request the bard to furnish them with an ode. ”

“ That kind of genius which consists in an intense perception of the spirit of its age, and in responding promptly to its demands, tends often actually to disqualify its possessor for posthumous popularity. And having found that Pindar possessed this kind of genius in an extraordinary degree, that he was able and willing to throw his whole soul into the expression of thoughts and the satisfaction of aspirations which were the very life and breath of his own generation, but of his own generation only, we see precisely in this fact the explanation at once of his success and of his failure. ”

“ Yet it would be very unjust to regard such clearness as merely a compensatory merit of lyric mediocrity, or to ignore its intimate connexion with the man’s native grace of mind, with the artist’s feeling for expression, with the poet’s delicate skill. How many readers, who could enjoy and appreciate Pindar if he were less difficult, are stopped on the threshold by the aspect of his style, and are fain to save their self-esteem by concluding that he is at once turgid and shallow! ”

“ Nem. ix.) , or is practically absent altogether (Ol. v. x. xii., all very short Odes; Isthm. ii.) The only exceptions are the Ode to Thero already mentioned (Ol. ii.) , and the Ode (Ol. vi.) to Agesias of Syracuse, a member of a sacerdotal house, whose peculiar privileges recalled, almost of course, the legend of their supposed ancestor Iamus, and thus enabled Pindar to grace his poem with one of the most exquisite tales in Greek mythology. ”

“ Pindar's doctrine is more cheerful, and more unselfish. He sees that the leaves fall, but he remembers that the tree will bud again. The individual aspirant to fame may fail, but the poet consoles him with the hope that he may live again in his descendants, and triumph in the reflected glories of their successes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet Pindar's warnings are conveyed with such tact that the Ode never ceases to seem an encomium. He dwells on the innate nobility of Hiero's character, and he urges the king to escape his temptations, not by becoming better, but by being what he is:—
"Learn thy true self, and live it!"
Flattery and evil counsels, he hints, are putting Hiero into a false position. Let him be himself, and no further reformation will be needed. Was ever an unpalatable warning conveyed with more consummate tact? The very reproach assumes the guise of a compliment. The censor is at the same time a panegyrist. ”

“ They are to be attached to a nobler chariot—the ideal car of the Muses. Their victory has, as it were, "sublimated their essence," and raised them into ideal beings, suitable for the ideal task demanded of them. So then through the gates of Song, whose bars fly back to admit them, the spiritualised mules and the spiritual chariot must pass, and bear the poet far away to Pitanè.
Pitanè was in sober fact a suburb or parish of Sparta; but Pindar's present purpose was not a visit to the city beside the Eurotas. ”

“ It was Alcman, as is supposed, who first gave to his poems a strophic arrangement, and the strophe has come to be essential to an ode. Stesichorus, Ibycus and Simonides of Ceos led the way to the two great masters of ode among the ancients, Pindar and Bacchylides. The form and verse-arrangement of Pindar’s great lyrics have regulated the type of the heroic ode. It is now perceived that they are consciously composed in very elaborate measures, and that each is the result of a separate act of creative ingenuity, but each preserving an absolute consistency of form. ”