Epinikion

Since the poets most often call their victory songs hymnoi (ὕμνοι), it has been conjectured that hymns for Heracles, honored as the founder of the Olympic Games, were the original model for the athletic epinikion.

Pindar's four surviving books of epinikia, called one of "the great monuments of Greek lyric", correspond to each of the four major festivals of the Panhellenic Games: Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean.

The odes celebrate runners, pentathletes, wrestlers, boxers, and charioteers; Pindar usually narrates or alludes elaborately to a myth connected to the victor's family or birthplace.

The Pindaric ode has a metrical structure rivaled in its complexity only by the chorus of Greek tragedy, and is usually composed in a triadic form comprising strophe, antistrophe, and epode.

[9] The epinikion praised the victorious athlete as an ideal representative of the community and of the aristocratic class, linking his achievements with those of local cult heroes.