The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  Certainly much of what Pindar celebrates is factually true. In a rather special sense, he was, to use George Dillon’s phrase, “the Greek sports-writer,”20 a kind of reporter of achievements for posterity.21 If we compare statues of Anacreon and Pindar, he emerges as crabbed, his face creased and fissured like the older Auden’s, but rather leaner, and with a beard in the luxurious style we would associate with his prosperous, smooth patrons, people whose reality impinged on the poet and his epinicean or victory odes at every point, complicating his own and the reader’s task.22

  An epinicean poet’s patron actually won a crown himself, or sponsored a winner in his own and his city’s name, at one of the four chief pan-Hellenic games. The dates of events which Pindar incorporates allusively in his poems correspond to actual contests, where we can verify them, and the trainers and the relations evoked are literal figures. The occasion is not lost sight of. Pindar also touches gingerly on the troubled history of his time both in Greece (threatened by Persia) and in Magna Graecia (by Carthage). He “touches on” events, but his poems transcend the immediate world. “He lived through one of the most eventful periods of history,” writes Bowra, “but hardly marked its salient characteristics.” He was not a journalist, he took politics as a given. “He was concerned with the individuals whom he knew and with the world of gods above and around them that made them what they were.”23

  We have considerable information about the poet, and some of it may be true. The earliest account of him was “compiled by the Peripatetic Chameleon and by Callimachus’ pupil Ister.”24 Four brief, contradictory lives exist to build from, as well as the account in the Suda. The most recently discovered life was published in 1961, a papyrus text from Oxyrhynchus dating from about AD 200. There are also the Vitae Ambrosiana, Thomana (attributed to Thomas Magister) and Metrica (31 hexameters, from the fourth or fifth century AD).25 Much that they contain goes back to factual and legendary sources and some facts are separately attested.

  He was born in Cynoscephalae (“Dog’s Head”), a village near Thebes, on the road to Leuctra, which is in the heart of Hesiod country, in 518 (or, some conjecture, 522) BC. The hills of Cynoscephalae became famous a few centuries later when the Roman Flaminius defeated the Macedonians under Philip V at the eponymous battle, proving the superior power of the Roman legionary system over the conventional phalanx. Seven hundred Romans slew or captured 13,000 Macedonians. There was no Pindar to sing that extraordinary victory, no Simonides to make the collective epitaph.

  Pindar was Boeotia’s second major poet. He was reared in Thebes, the city of Heracles, whose life and labours are a recurrent theme in the poems. Four times he evokes Zeus and Alcmene, that hero’s parents; he tells the story of baby Hercules strangling the serpents in his cot in Nemean I, and the Nemean lion, the golden hind, the Augean stables, the horses of Diomedes, the cattle of Geryon, the expedition against the Amazons and the wrestling with Antaeus all feature. For Pindar, Heracles’ sacking of Troy was as momentous as the Trojan War itself: he alludes to it five times directly. We visit the Pillars of Heracles four times, and the founding of the Olympian Games is recounted twice. Heracles is for Pindar a spirit of human transcendence, overcoming even death; he is also a fellow townsman.

  Thebes stands in the centre of Boeotia, and though the present city is disappointingly parched, provincial and prosaic, music and verse played a large part in its creation. Amphion built the original city walls not out of music precisely, but by means of it.26 His labour was destroyed and restored a dozen times. Even in the last two centuries Thebes has twice been demolished by earthquakes and rebuilt.

  Visiting in the second or first century BC. Heracleides described the city as circular in shape. In fact, it was more like a bumpy ostrich egg. It had seven gates (against which seven heroes famously marched). It claimed the invention of the Greek alphabet. Though ancient, the streets were new “because, as the histories tell us, the city has been thrice razed to the ground on account of the morose and overbearing character of the inhabitants.”27 Heracleides tells us that when the Spartan king Pausanias was knocking it down, someone wrote, in trochaic verse, on the wall of Pindar’s house, “Don’t fire the dwelling of the Muses’ poet Pindar.” Pausanias seems to have heeded this advice. The house became Thebes’ hall of magistrates.

  Apart from being flattened and reconstructed, what did Thebes do for a living? It bred mighty horses. At the time of Heracleides’ visit, it was also a patchwork of wonderful gardens, irrigated by two rivers. The men were tough, spoiling for fights, litigious, violent, vigorous, in every respect alive. “The women are the tallest, prettiest and most graceful in all Greece.” How could he know? They cover themselves, he tells us, so completely that only the eyes can be seen. But then he shows us more: “All of them dress in white and wear low purple shoes laced so as to show the bare feet. Their yellow hair is tied up in a knot on the top of the head … They have pleasing voices, while the voices of the men are harsh and deep.”28

  Thebes cradled some celebrated infants and was home to many famous men. Dionysus was its divine citizen, Heracles its hero, Teiresias its seer. Labdacus, a descendant of Cadmus, fathered a line of tragic kings (Oedipus was his grandson). When Pindar was born, the city was marshalling its energies to become one of the great city-states of Greece (and, for a brief period in the fourth century BC, the greatest). The powerhouse of Boeotia, its story provides Pindar with allusions, images, intensities. Some of the details are quite circumstantial and rather touching, as when he tells us his actual birth season:

  the four-yearly festival with its oxen in procession,

  During which for the first time I was laid down, a loved

  Tight-swaddled infant.29

  Visitors looking for the afterlife of ancient Thebes today will be disappointed; apart from the good museum and the excavations of the palace, there is nothing much to see. War and earthquake have erased the heroic and the tragic city. An old sarcophagus, some juttings of Roman masonry, the parched springs and fountains … too much bustle, too little memory even to be called “sad.”

  Oedipus, a victim of faulty memory, fathered four children on his mother Jocasta. Forceful Antigone has a tragedy all of her own, and her sister, long-suffering Ismene, is her shade. Oedipus’ ill-starred sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, waged a Cain and Abel rivalry that led to the ruinous war of the Seven Against Thebes, without which Greek literature would have been much the poorer. Legend places it in 1198 BC, close beside Troy’s overthrow. Thebes, however, was rebuilt, not for the last time.

  Pindar’s Thebes distrusted and disliked Athens, and this rivalry led—during Pindar’s lifetime—to one of its disastrous miscalculations: it favoured the Persians against the allied Greek states. The Medes made Thebes their centre of operations before the Battle of Plataea (479 BC). This, and the battle of Salamis a year before, touched Pindar. Sparta and Athens were merciless after the Persian defeat. When Thebes at last sided decisively with Athens against Philip of Macedon, her defeat was total. In 336, a Theban uprising against the Persians was suppressed by the “the great Emathian conqueror,”30 the young Alexander. Pindar had celebrated Alexander’s ancestor Alexander I for an athletic victory.31 Perhaps the young leader remembered Pindar’s tribute, for when he razed Thebes he too left Pindar’s house standing, along with the temples. He slew 6,000 citizens and enslaved an additional 30,000. Thebes’ habit of backing the wrong ally continued to cost it dear down through the Roman period. By the time Strabo and then Pausanias visited, the place had become little more than a hamlet. Vestiges of Pindar’s city were still traceable in Pausanias’ time, however. “If you pass down the right side of the stadium you will come to the racecourse: Pindar’s memorial”—his tomb?—“is inside it.”32 Thebes flourished once again in the twelfth century as a silk-producing city, but it exported its skill and technology to Sicily: Magna Graecia once more outstripped the old country. Under the Turks, the pasha wisely made his home not in Thebes but in more temperate Levadia
.

  One day, when Pindar was a boy, on his way to Thespiai, he was overcome by the heat and lay down for a nap. As he slept, bees came and made their wax upon his lips. (We may be reminded of the nightingale which landed on the baby Stesichorus’ lips and sang a prophetic aria.) After the visitation of the bees, Pindar began to compose songs. The story is beautiful and absurd. The bee image stays with him, his poem is like a bee that hurries from tale to tale, and there is honey in many of his poems.33

  Another less colourful legend (sourced in the Peripatetic Chameleon) says that, as they had done with Hesiod, the Muses greeted Pindar on Mount Helicon (he was, after all, a Boeotian) and there gave him an olive branch.

  Fortunately there was a serious market for songs. That market was secular and religious, though the division was not so strictly drawn then as it is today. The Pythian priestess, Apollo’s voice, honoured him by telling the people of Delphi to give Pindar equal share in the tithes they paid Apollo. Money was a key part of every epinicean poet’s calculation: Simonides’ genius was synonymous with greed.

  Pindar was more than a man of unparalleled verbal skills: he was an artist—we need to believe—whom money gratified but did not wholly govern. In his old age two strange events occurred. The god Pan was overheard by a traveller singing one of Pindar’s odes. Pindar wrote a poem to Pan, thanking him for the honour. After that, the goddess Demeter grew jealous because he had not written a poem for her, so he obliged her and set up altars to both Pan and Demeter (or Rhea) outside his house. This may be an over-reading of the line “I will pray to the Mother whom girls sing to at night with Pan beside my door.”34 The story has it that he was on a mountain giving a tutorial to the aulos-player Olympichus when he heard a rumbling noise, saw flame and, in stone, the image of the Mother of the Gods. It was enough to occasion a spectacular effort in verse.

  Another legend is a variation on the Mother of the Gods vision. In a dream Persephone (or Demeter) stood beside him and complained that she was the only deity he had never celebrated. He was mortified but he could not write a poem for her in time: he died. That was not the end of the story. An old female relation of Pindar’s in Thebes had learnt how to sing his songs. He visited her, in turn, in a dream and sang a hymn to Persephone. When she awoke, Pausanias says, she wrote down everything she had heard him sing. We are in 438 BC and an old woman is said by Pausanias to have been able to write down a complex poem in a tradition which she understood and perhaps served herself. Pindar honoured the gods even from beyond the grave. And he did this altruistically, unless of course he was angling for ghostly benefits in Hades, where Persephone spent her winters.

  Who were Pindar’s parents? In one poem he calls the family of the Aigeidai “my fathers.” They played a major role in founding the colony of Thera.35 If we take the speaker to be Pindar himself, he is claiming to be part of an ancient, now international clan with connections to Sparta, Thera and Cyrene. The Aigeidai are a typical “extended kinship group,” and we meet such aristocracies (which is precisely what they are) elsewhere in Pindar. The extended family and the city of a victor are concerns in Pindaric poetry, which celebrates particular victories but emphasises where possible two aspects of the victor’s family: its antiquity and its wide connections throughout the Greek world.

  If we wish to pin him down to a particular father, we have a choice of names. Corinna, a fellow Boeotian who, the Suda says, won five victories against him and may have instructed him, named Scopelinus as his sire. Another source proposes Pagondas or Pagonidas.36 Most poets, however, name Daiphantus; Scopelinus was his uncle, or the father of a less famous son, or Pindar’s step-father. Some say he taught Pindar the aulos, while others claim he passed Pindar on to Lasus of Hermione for teaching. Assigning him a mother is less complicated. She was Cleodice or Cledice, according to the Ambrosian Vita. The name means “justly famed.” We can extend his family further. The Vita Metrica provides him with a twin brother, Eritimus (“honoured in strife”), who distinguished himself as a boxer and wrestler, which is assumed to explain Pindar’s intimate knowledge of athletic matters. Seventeen of the surviving forty-five odes, which vary in length from twenty-five to two hundred lines, are dedicated to wrestlers, boxers or winners of the pancration, the trial of strength which involved boxing, wrestling, kicking, strangling and twisting. Biting and gouging were forbidden, but almost everything else was allowed, including bone-breaking, wrenching limbs out of joint, neck holds and so on.

  For once we can provide our poet with a wife, even a choice of wives. The first, whose name means roughly what his mother’s name meant, is Megacleia, “greatly famed.” Or if we prefer the Vita Metrica we can pair him off with Timoxeine, “honoured by strangers.” And there are children. He had a son called Daiphantus for whom he wrote a daphnephorikon,37 of which two lines survive. A son was often named after his grandfather. This lends support to Daiphantus’ paternity claim.38 Pindar may have had two daughters as well, Protomache and Eumetis, according to the Ambrosian Vita. The Vita Metrica also names them and says that they performed in his parthenia.39

  Athenaeus affirms that Pindar “was no moderate lover.”40 It is an odd statement on the face of it: when we think of Pindar we think of austerity, strictness, formal exercise, buttons done up. A lover? A man about town? Maybe even, David Mulroy suggests, something of a joker? “May it be mine both to make love / and to gratify another’s love when appropriate,” he declares. And whatever his family ties, he enjoyed a death, according to some sources, which Ibycus, Solon, Alcman and other Greek poets would have envied. He died in Argos some time after 446 (the date of his last epinicean, Pythian VIII), probably in 438 BC “not long after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, but he lived to see the liberation of Boeotia at the battle of Coroneia in 447 BC.”41

  A happy legend sets his death in the theatre, in the arms of Theoxenus of Tenedos, for whom he had written a dazzling, unambiguously erotic encomium. Lesky apologises for the surviving fragment “Pederasty is here spiritualised: the beams that dart from the eyes of Theoxenus kindle a flame in the poet’s heart.” Any spiritual dimension was rooted in a physical response to the boy’s extraordinary beauty. Pindar was eighty, dry kindling. The flame of desire burst forth and burnt him through. Youth, not old age, is the time for love:

  But no matter who it is, whoever

  Sees those rays flash from the eyes of Theoxenus and is not

  Brimmed with desire has a heart that’s black

  And founded out of adamant or steel

  With a heatless flame, and from bright-gazing Aphrodite

  Earns no respect …

  Because of love the old man melts like wax, and the image of wax ushers in the Pindaric bees, busy making sweetness and light. It also makes way for the image of Icarus, flying disastrously on wings made of feathers and meltable wax.

  Between the stories of his birth and the legends of his death comes the fact of the poems. How and where did he learn to compose, who were his patrons, what genre did he write in?

  Plutarch declares that he was “a pupil of Myrtis, a woman.”42 He began to learn his art in Thebes:

  glorious Thebes taught me

  to be no stranger to nor ignorant of

  the Muses.43

  He probably went on to school in Athens to study music, poetry, choreography: “the art of the choral ode” in all its complexity.44 His contributions to the dithyramb competitions in honour of Dionysus were noticed, though Simonides of Cos was supreme dithyrambist. Pindar was in Athens at the close of the age out of which the epinicean tradition had, rather suddenly, arisen. By the time he died, most of the tyrants had been deposed, oligarchies were more common, a kind of democracy was gathering force. Aristocratic values persisted, but the stability of that Greece had been shaken apart.45 “Pindar spoke for the old aristocratic world which Athens opposed both in her empire and outside it.”46

  In Athens he came under the protection of the Alcmaeonid family, powerful preservers and reformers. His one
Athenian epinicean ode is for Megacles, an Alcmaeonid, written shortly after he was ostracised (Pythian VII, 486 BC). There is evidence that he may have composed a threnos, or dirge, for Megacles’ father. When Pindar praises Athens, it is not for its triumph over the Persians at Salamis and Plataia, but because, sponsored by the Alcmaeonids, it rebuilt with such grandeur the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Bowra claims, “As a boy he had learned his art in Athens, and for Athens he kept a certain affection until the emergence of Pericles and his treatment of Boeotia and Aegina made tolerance impossible.”47 Apollodorus and—or—Agathocles (who also taught Damon, the musical theorist) probably instructed him, and in Athens he first achieved recognition. His master left the apprentice Pindar in charge during preparations for a major festival. He trained the choruses and made a success of it.

  Lasus of Hermione modernised and subtilised the dithyramb, making it possible for a once stale genre to hold its own against tragedy. Lasus was almost certainly not Pindar’s teacher, despite what the Vita Thomana says: the dates of his presence in Athens do not stack up. Nor was Simonides his master, though legend attributed both to him as teachers. Lasus improved the dance and music and helped to establish the dithyrambic competitions in Athens. Pindar won in 497–96 BC. Simonides won no fewer than fifty-six times, but his dithyrambs have perished. Five large and one largish chunk of Pindar’s dithyrambs survive.