The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  Older scholars find in Pindar’s poems the best evidence of his career. Every time he says something, they take it either as literal biographical fact or as expressing an omission, commission, oblique allusion to some fee paid or unpaid, some subtle back-handedness, some indirection. If we over-interpret, which is what Pindaric patristics were tempted to do, we can devise a complex and unsustainable life story from a series of poetic statements, largely conventional.48 Modern scholars are more circumspect. They dismiss the Vitae because of their contradictions, and they do not readily credit what Pindar’s poems say in the first person at all, thus going to an opposite extreme. If we can accept that a poet called Pindar wrote the four books of odes which so substantially survive, as well as at least some of the copious fragments, and that he was one person and not an atelier or a tradition, we can infer certain things about him.

  His Boeotian background affected the way he acted. He rejects the bumpkin tradition that insisted that all Boeotians were crass and uneducated, by challenging someone to see “whether we truly escape that ancient reproach, ‘Boeotian pig.’”49 His Boeotian origin set him potentially at odds with Athens. It is not clear to what extent local rivalries affected such a man, who belonged to a cosmopolitan élite. Among the élite, ties of family and friendship often crossed the boundaries of the polis. Is it plausible, as legend has it, that Thebes fined him one thousand or ten thousand drachma for praising Athens, and Athens paid the fine? The verses from the dithyramb in question say:

  O shimmering, crowned with violet, celebrated in song,

  Hellas’ fortress, famous famous Athens,

  The gods’ high place …50

  In later poems Athens is arrogant Bellerophon, murderous Aigisthos, the “unruly giant Porphyrion.”’51 There is very little directly about Athens in the poetry. He may have been dissuaded from praising it. He admired the Athenian trainer of athletes Melesias but apologised when he included him in a poem for fear that in praising an Athenian he might be thought to be praising Athens itself.52 Yet some say, perhaps confusing the story with the tale of the fine, that Athens gave him honorary rights and 10,000 drachmas; at Delphi he was invited annually by a special herald’s cry to partake of the meal of the god’s festival. Alexandrians and Romans regarded him not only as a great poet, but as the greatest lyric poet of all time.

  He associated with Greek notables, had long-term relations with tyrants in Sicily and worked frequently with citizens from the small prosperous island of Aegina, a rival and eventual victim of Athens. That relationship is one of the most interesting, both biographically and poetically. Eleven odes are dedicated to Aeginetan victors, almost a quarter of Pindar’s epinicean oeuvre.

  Travellers following the coastal road from Corinth to Athens just beyond Megara look right across the gulf to Salamis, and beyond it on a clear day (less infrequent now than at one time) appears the unmissable peak of the island of Aegina. “Long-oared Aegina” Pindar calls it,53 as though it could control its direction in a hostile sea. Once it contested Athens’ control of sea trade. Pindar was attached to his Aeginetan patrons and to the place’s history, for it was a nursery of heroes, including Neoptolemus and Ajax and Achilles. In an early paean he celebrates it; and its rich families commissioned epinicea. Aegina like Boeotia had a mixed Dorian and Aeolic population. Because of its enmity with Athens—it fought with the Athenian fleet at Salamis—it often found itself on the same side of the conference table as Thebes. His chief patron in Aegina was Lampon, whose son he celebrated in Isthmian VI.

  He travelled from mainland Greece to Magna Graecia. Around 476–74 BC, he moved to Sicily and frequented the courts of two tyrants, Theron of Acragas and Hieron of Gela and Syracuse. It was for his Sicilian patrons that he wrote some of the greatest epinicean odes, in particular Olympian I and III. Did he enjoy his time in Sicily? Most scholars believe he spent two years on the island, directing performances of his own compositions.54 Bowra claims that he stayed for one winter only, returning to Greece in the spring and never visiting Sicily again. “From Pythian II we form the impression that he was not happy in a tyrant’s court and preferred to compose poems for his Sicilian patrons in the detachment of his own home.”55 Bowra’s view is contestable: he is keen to imbue his poet with an anachronistic, instinctive political liberalism, evidence of how easy it is to apply to a favourite poet familiar templates, to make him a little too familiar.

  After Sicily, Pindar found in North Africa (modern-day Libya), in the court of Telesicrates of Cyrene, another discriminating and rich patron. North Africa, like Sicily before it, opened up a range of new mythological possibilities. Arcesilas IV of Cyrene won the chariot race at Delphi in 462 and was celebrated in two poems. Pythian V was intended for performance in Cyrene at “the feast of the Dorian Apollo Carneius”;56 the other, Pythian IV, is the longest of the surviving epiniceans, and was sung at a feast in the palace.

  Pindar’s very mobility refreshed his poems with new material as it refreshed his purse with new patronage, and he was so restless as a formalist that every beginning is quite fresh and different from the one before. He survived into the age of Pericles, but his world view and values belong to the time before the Persian wars, and to the courts in which he did poetic service. Of an aristocratic persuasion himself, he believed as much as sour Theognis of Megara did that human excellence is blood-related and heroic or divine in origin. Poetic excellence, too, is made by and accessible to the refined, the instructed individual, who has the skill as well as the sensibility to appreciate its subject and its rooted, allusive language, the tones and images often specific to a class or clan, to a landscape or history. Quintilian says Pindar is “by far the most renowned of all the lyric poets” and stresses the scale of his undertakings, his moral teaching, his language, the wealth of matter he invests in a poem. His eloquence is a kind of mighty river. But even to the Roman poets he provided insoluble problems of comprehension.

  Aristophanes of Byzantium, whom we encountered as chief librarian at Alexandria between 194 and 180 BC, and editor of Homer and Alcaeus, edited Pindar’s poetry into seventeen books.57 Our sense of the poet is seriously skewed by the accident that, of these scrolls, the contents of only four substantially survived, with fragments (some extended) from the other thirteen.

  Eleven of the books were directly related to worship and can be regarded as variously liturgical in character and use. Had we all seventeen, our book list would look something like this:

  1 Hymns to the Gods

  2 Paeans (mainly to Apollo)58

  3–4 Dithyrambs (mainly to Dionysus)

  5–6 Prosodia (processional hymns)

  7–9 Parthenia

  10–11 Hyporchemata (dance-odes)

  There would have been six non-religious books, though the division is artificial given the number of religious references, invocations and prayers in the poems.

  21–15 Epinicean Odes (Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, Isthmian)

  16 Threnoi (laments)

  17 Encomia (praises, for singing at banquets)

  The Nemean Odes originally came last, and this explains the rather odd inclusion at the end of two non-Nemean poems, one of which is not even epinicean but is a poem celebrating the accession of a new councillor. Probably, when the texts were copied from scrolls to codices, the two books were transposed; as a result we have also lost part of the end of the Isthmian Odes.

  Why did the Epinicean Odes survive while the rest of the oeuvre was seriously damaged by the moths of time? So much of what is left of Simonides and Bacchylides is epinicean, too, that we see them as specialising in this type of poetry, as though Ted Hughes’ laureate poems alone were in print and we regarded him as a generic laureate, or Whitman’s Civil War poems and we regarded him solely as an elegist. Were the odes popular? Probably not in the way that lyric and epic poetry were: their expression is complex, even for an audience reared on Homer; their performance would have entailed a major production appropriate at the point of victory or on the vict
or’s return home, but in all likelihood not often repeated afterwards. They were strictly “occasional.” If tragedies in the great Athenian competitions were composed for a single performance, as scholars suggest, it seems unlikely that epinicean odes enjoyed a longer run. It is thought that after Pindar’s death and the political and social changes that occurred in the Greek world, epinicean poetry lost whatever popular audience it had rather quickly, and Pindar had no very worthy successors. It was only when the Alexandrian editors at the great library got their teeth into Pindar that he was revalued, but in a different context, the poems as literary rather than as performance scores. As text, his work was relished principally by specialists who enjoyed Pindaric puzzlement and the engrossing pastime of annotation.

  In the interim, in a scattered way, the poems survived. Thebes or Athens might have been proud to keep a collection of Pindar’s work in its library. A noble family might have insisted that a work celebrating its antecedents and achievements and in which it had invested good money should be preserved. A city might have seen to it that a poem that praised it should survive. But the odes do not praise directly; they do not tell stories in a conventional way; their transitions are abrupt, their parallelisms so subtle that they have been known to frustrate two and a half millennia of scholars.

  Could it have been a “class thing,” reading and reciting Pindar, and the emergence even in a democratic society of a middle class with pretensions meant that certain older forms were preserved to signal cultural bona fides? When the comic dramatist Aristophanes portrays a standard conservative middle-aged Athenian man in the 420s BC, the man requires his son to sing him an epinicean ode composed by Simonides. Simonides died in 468. Aristophanes’ caricature-Athenian asks to hear a poem about a sporting victory that took place more than forty years earlier …

  Or was an interest in sport and its political symbolism, in particular in the great pan-Hellenic festivals, such that the actual occasions of the poems ensured their survival? The poetic celebration of sport begins with Homer and the funeral games for Patroclus, if not before, and there the heroes have the dignity of their cities weighing on them as they compete. Lesky remarks that the epinicean tradition led “to an unparalleled connection between sport and art in Greek life,” a connection that reached a climax of intensity in Pindar. He argues that Simonides, in the ram-shearing poem and in the Glaucus ode, where he compares the young boxer favourably with Polydeuces and Heracles, was wry and light-hearted, “elements quite irreconcilable with the heavy seriousness of Pindar’s victory odes.”59“Heavy seriousness” is one of those phrases which push Pindar away. Serious he certainly is, but “heavy” has the wrong valency.

  The odes do “affirm the common value of athletic achievement,” and their function is to create continuities in various directions, to integrate the individual with the communal, the legendary and the religious. The victor is portrayed as an ideal representative member of the aristocratic class and as an ideal member of his city. His ode, commissioned at considerable expense from a professional poet by his father, his tyrant, his brother or a patron, was sung chorally by the men in the victor’s home city or at the games by a chorus from his city, visiting for ceremonial purposes. The myths and legends the poems evoked were chosen for their appositeness to the victor’s home city and to the location of the games, binding the one with the other. They were par excellence the pan-Hellenic mode, a poetry of connection which drew even the remotest cities of Magna Graecia into the heart of what was Greek and Greece. Pindar was commissioned by patrons from mainland Greece and the islands, from North Africa, Italy, Sicily. Colonists affirmed that they were Greek, the commissioned poems travelled back to Greece and reminded Greece of their remote but glorious existence.

  It is possible that a tyrant or an aristocrat commissioning a poem had some say in the choice of theme, of myth and legend. Given the variety of the epinicean poems, not only in form (which we can assume was entirely the province of the poet) but in theme, we might conclude that there was an element of collaboration. At the crudest level, a patron paying 100 drachma could expect a shorter poem than a patron paying 500 drachma. The more a patron paid, the more solemn the piper’s obligation. Some of the obscurities in the poems may have to do with requirements placed on the poet which would have gratified a patron, a victor, a community, but whose nuances are lost in history and with them the sense of a juxtaposition or allusion. Other external factors might weigh upon the poet: was the poem to be performed by amateurs or professionals, choreographed and conducted by the poet himself or by another, in the town where the victory occurred or in the victor’s home town, shortly after the event or much later? How much time elapsed between a victory and the performance of an ode? How long did Pindar have in which to complete the exceptionally complex text of one of his poems? How did he write down the music, if he did, and record the choreography?

  More than any other classical poetic genre, the epinicean ode is tied into a world of strict contingencies of this kind, and its task is to weave those contingencies into the timeless fabric of legend and the divine. Much of the difficulty of the poems has to do with those vanished contingencies. The obscurity of works of literature usually has less to do with the range of allusion and reference, more with the loss of informing occasions and cultures. We can usually see what a poet is attempting; often we cannot say why he is attempting it.

  Association with Pindar brought wealthy tyrants and aristocrats an immediate prestige that money did in fact buy. Pindar, Bacchylides and Simonides used literary skills and reputation to inscribe their patrons in the cultural tradition of Greece. They played a role in creating a respectable, even venerable, image of their patrons in the Greek world. Pindar had much to offer the most powerful men of his time; he should not be seen as a dependent hanger-on at the courts of the great. Like Michelangelo, reproved for the idealisation of the portrait statues on the Medici tomb, Pindar knew that what mattered was what lasted, the higher truth of the achieved form: “In a hundred years who will care what they actually looked like?”

  Every epinicean ode has certain givens, certain basic information it must impart, and it may fulfil this obligation directly or obliquely. Simonides outlines what is required in a snatch of dialogue which we can call an epigram:

  “Tell your name, your father’s, your city, your victory.”

  “Casmylus, son of Euagoras, boxing at Pythia, Rhodes.”

  Pindar plays variations on the formula. Obliquity is his hallmark: “bronze-shielded” indicates a race in armour; “foot” means foot race; even the location of the games can be coded in, embedded as it were, and the references to divinity may at times seem to include more than one god at a time. Certainly the gods of the place must be acknowledged and honoured, and heroic legends chosen which celebrate the place, the victor’s city, his family, or which have some relevance to his achievement. The realm of myth is incorporated in a similar spirit.

  Richmond Lattimore believes that Pindar is more careful and controlled in the elaborate and ceremonial openings of his poems than in their conclusions, which can seem abrupt and peremptory. He summarises the necessary epinicean elements as “invocation, occasion, victor, prayer, moral, and myth.”60 They do not necessarily follow that order. The most curiously Pindaric ingredient in the verse is the legend and myth. They are included not as story—the story is assumed already to be known to his audience and the poem simply draws upon those elements relevant to its “occasion,” those narrative “moments” which share a dynamic, a light, with it.61

  Games associated with the gods were celebrated in many parts of Greece but the four principal venues, briefly considered in our life of Simonides,62 each possessed a distinctive purpose and history.

  The games at Olympia were established in 776 BC. Heracles came to Pisa (beside Olympia) with his wealth and his followers. His very first act was to sanctify certain areas for his father Zeus and for the other gods. Having prepared the place, he inaugurated the games, whic
h were to occur every four years. Victors were rewarded not with money or a cup but with a perishable wreath of wild olive branches. The games, part of the Festival of Zeus, were the most important of all, and the longest-lived: they were last celebrated at Olympia in AD 261, a millennium of sporting contest. The foot-race remained the main event for most of that time. At their height, the games attracted up to 50,000 visitors.

  Why did they survive so long? Because Zeus survived. Because the landscape of Olympia is inspiring, literally breath-taking. It is a place that, by means of the veins of rivers and springs, connects with other parts of Greece. The sacred river Alpheus dives underground, for example, and under sea, and surfaces elsewhere, in Sicily, at the Fountain of Arethusa. The place, like the games, is a centre of connections. The ancient tribes of Greece assembling there, where nature manifests its most unfathomable otherness and beauty, where it is impossible not to believe in the gods and honour them with awe and every human gift, were reconciled. The divisions that colonisation, conflict, the alienations of time and history had made were transcended and for the duration of a games, there was a Greek nation.

  After the Olympic Games, the Pythian were the most important, dedicated to the Festival of Apollo. They began at Delphi in 582 BC and at first were more concerned with poetry and music than with sport. Here the victor was rewarded with a crown of laurel, or bay leaves. Delphi is one of the holiest sites in ancient Greece. It was believed to be the very centre of the earth, the omphalos: a navel stone still exists in the museum. And if Olympia is remarkable, Delphi is no less so, a place of circles and shadows, sudden coolnesses, peculiar acoustics, a mysterious location chosen by the gods. Zeus released an eagle from the far east and another from the far west and they met at Delphos: that is how the mid-point was determined, Pindar says.63 This was Apollo’s principal sanctuary. George Chapman’s Elizabethan version of the Homeric “Hymn to Apollo” describes Parnassus, the sacred rocks, the cave: the bouldery area