Pisander

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Other spiders, as large as crabs, were creeping quietly over the ground and the walls as if this was their home and not the king’s!
There was one spider twice as large as the others. Surely he was the head of that large family. He fixed his fiery eyes upon the marionette and spoke in the voice of the Talking Cricket: “Where have you come from—fool that you are? What do you think you have gained by becoming the emperor of these people? Return to your home, and be content to be a boy like the rest, and to learn a trade by which you may help your father and be happy yourself.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Cognate terms in the non-Teutonic languages are wanting. — Modern High German Spießgeselle, ‘accomplice,’ literally ‘comrade in arms.’
Spieß (2.) , masculine, ‘spit’ (cooking) , from the equivalent Middle High German and Old High German spiȥ (genitive spiȥȥes) , masculine; corresponding to Dutch spit, Anglo-Saxon spitu, English spit. These cognates, whence the equivalent Romance term, Italian spito, are connected with the adjective spitz, of which Anglo-Saxon spitu is a substantive form. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The prince groaned as he rode away. Across his path was a green bough, half covered by a huge cobweb. In this a tiny being, no bigger than a fly, was entangled, and was making desperate struggles to be free. Travelling toward it, with tremendous strides, came an enormous red spider, with white spots and great protruding eyes. The prince, not without a shudder, for, like most of us, he hated the nasty things, killed the spider with a blow, and set free the pretty captive, who proved to be a fairy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For crowns entwined about his hair demand from me this god-appointed debt, that for Ainesidamos' son I join in seemly sort the lyre of various tones with the flute's cry and ordering of words.
And Pisa bids me speak aloud, for from her come to men songs of divine assignment, when the just judge of games the Aitolian [2] man, fulfilling Herakles' behests of old, hath laid upon one's hair above his brows pale-gleaming glory of olive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These two Odes, it must be confessed, breath [e] [Pg 3] much of the spirit of Pindar, but then they have caught the seeming obscurity, the sudden transition, and hazardous epithet, of his mighty master; all which, though evidently intended for beauties, will, probably, be regarded as blemishes, by the generality of his Readers. In short, they are in some measure, a representation of what Pindar now appears to be, though perhaps, not what he appeared to the States of Greece, when they rivalled each other in his applause, and when Pan himself was seen dancing to his melody. ”

“ If the selection of Pindar in particular as a Greek poet with claims to be further popularized among Englishmen may be defended, there is still a more general count to which all who make endeavours to attract or retain attention to Greek literature will in these times be called upon to plead by voices which command respect. ”

“ Pinsker is one of those men of yesterday, whom the men of to-day have already had time to forget. He died ten years ago, and in these ten years things have changed, and we with them. New birds have come and brought new songs. They pipe in a loud and strident chorus, in the din of which who shall remember the forlorn lay of a lonely songster whom earth knows no more? ”

“ Pinocchio sells his Spelling-book that he may go and see a puppet-show.
As soon as it had done snowing Pinocchio set out for school with his fine Spelling-book under his arm. As he went along he began to imagine a thousand things in his little brain, and to build a thousand castles in the air, one more beautiful than the other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No man that breathes was ever alway blest.
Here we must stop short in the front of Pindar—the Hamlet among these lesser actors, the Shakespeare among a crowd of inferior poets. To treat of Greek lyrical poetry and to omit Pindar is a paradox in action. Yet Pindar is so colossal, so much apart, that he deserves a separate study, and cannot be dragged in at the end of a bird's-eye view of a period of literature. At the time of Pindar, poetry was sinking into mannerism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Pinocchio, mortified at being called a crawfish, indignantly cried out: “I am not a crawfish! Look at me; I am a marionette.”
“A marionette!” replied the fisherman. “Well, well! A marionette fish is a new kind to me. All the better; I shall eat you with more relish.”
“Eat me? But you do not understand! I am not a fish. Don’t you see that I reason and talk as you do?”
“It is true,” replied the fisherman. “As I see that you live in the water and must be a fish, and as you know how to reason and talk, I will respect your wisdom and will therefore let you decide.” ”

“ In my choice of a metre I have been led by the following considerations. The beauty and completeness of the stanza of Spenser appear now to be generally acknowledged. But it certainly presents great difficulties in a language so unvocal compared with those of Southern Europe, and so little abounding in rhymes as the English. It is more difficult in a narrative and consecutive poem than in one of a descriptive and reflective character, like Childe Harold, where the topics and the order in which they shall be discussed are both at the discretion of the poet. ”