Quintilian wrote, "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence, characteristics which, as Horace rightly held, make him inimitable.

[3] Some scholars in the modern age also found his poetry perplexing, at least until the 1896 discovery of some poems by his rival Bacchylides; comparisons of their work showed that many of Pindar's idiosyncrasies are typical of archaic genres rather than of only the poet himself.

[6] Like other poets of the Archaic Age, he has a profound sense of the vicissitudes of life, but he also articulates a passionate faith in what men can achieve by the grace of the gods, most famously expressed in the conclusion to one of his Victory Odes:[7] Creatures of a day!

[10] The other four are collections that were not finalized until some 1600 years after his death: Although these sources are based on a much older literary tradition, going as far back as Chamaeleon of Heraclea in the 4th century BC, they are generally viewed with scepticism today: much of the material is clearly fanciful.

[11][12] Scholars both ancient and modern have turned to Pindar's own work – his victory odes in particular – as a source of biographical information: some of the poems touch on historic events and can be accurately dated.

Membership of this clan possibly contributed to Pindar's success as a poet, and it informed his political views, which are marked by a conservative preference for oligarchic governments of the Doric kind.

[clarification needed] Possibly he was responding to anger among Aeginetans and/or Molossians over his portrayal of Neoptolemus in an earlier poem, Paean 6, which had been commissioned by the priests at Delphi and which depicted the hero's death in traditional terms, as divine retribution for his crimes.

Commissions took him to all parts of the Greek world – to the Panhellenic festivals in mainland Greece (Olympia, Delphi, Corinth and Nemea), westwards to Sicily, eastwards to the seaboard of Asia Minor, north to Macedonia and Abdera (Paean 2) and south to Cyrene on the African coast.

For example, Olympian 2 and Pythian 2, composed in honour of the Sicilian tyrants Theron and Hieron following his visit to their courts in 476–75 BC, refer respectively to ravens and an ape, apparently signifying rivals who were engaged in a campaign of smears against him – possibly the poets Simonides and his nephew Bacchylides.

For example, the victory ode mentioned above (Pythian 8) describes the downfall of the giants Porphyrion and Typhon and this might be Pindar's way of covertly celebrating a recent defeat of Athens by Thebes at the Battle of Coronea (447 BC).

Covert criticism of Athens (traditionally located in odes such as Pythian 8, Nemean 8 and Isthmian 7) is now dismissed as highly unlikely, even by scholars who allow some biographical and historical interpretations of the poems.

Thus Pindar refers obliquely to the murder of Phocus by his brothers Peleus and Telamon ("I am shy of speaking of a huge risk, hazarded not in right"), telling the audience that he will not talk of it ("silence is a man's wisest counsel").

The Muses are to him as an oracle is to a prophet, and lesser poets are to him as ravens are to an eagle; the art of such men is as hackneyed as garland-making; his is magical:[85][86][87][88] εἴρειν στεφάνους ἐλαφρόν: ἀναβάλεο: Μοῖσά τοι κολλᾷ χρυσὸν ἔν τε λευκὸν ἐλέφανθ᾽ ἁμᾷ καὶ λείριον ἄνθεμον ποντίας ὑφελοῖσ᾽ ἐέρσας.

One surviving fragment of a maiden song does seem to be different in tone, due however to the fact that it is spoken in the character of a girl:[97][98][99] ἐμὲ δὲ πρέπει παρθενήια μὲν φρονεῖν γλώσσᾳ τε λέγεσθαι.

When the chamber of the scarlet-clothed Hours is opened And the nectareous flowers usher in the fragrant spring, Then are scattered, then, on the immortal ground The lovely petals of violets; roses are wound in our hair; Loudly echo the voices of songs to the flutes, And choirs step in procession to dark-ribboned Semele.

[109] Sentences are compressed to the point of obscurity, unusual words and periphrases give the language an esoteric quality, and transitions in meaning often seem erratic, the images seem to burst out – it is a style that sometimes baffles but also makes his poetry vivid and unforgettable.

– Richard Claverhouse Jebb[91]His odes were animated by... one burning glow which darted out a shower of brilliant images, leapt in a white-hot spark across gaps unbridgeable by thought, passed through a commonplace leaving it luminous and transparent, melted a group of heterogeneous ideas into a shortlived unity and, as suddenly as a flame, died.

εἶδον γὰρ ἑκὰς ἐὼν τὰ πόλλ᾽ ἐν ἀμαχανίᾳ ψογερὸν Ἀρχίλοχον βαρυλόγοις ἔχθεσιν πιαινόμενον: τὸ πλουτεῖν δὲ σὺν τύχᾳ πό- :τμου σοφίας ἄριστον.God achieves all his purpose and fulfills his every hope, God who can overtake the winged eagle, or upon the sea and he bends the arrogant heart of many a man, But gives to others eternal glory that will never fade.

The best that fate can bring is wealth The stanza begins with a celebration of divine power, and then abruptly shifts to a darker, more allusive train of thought, featuring condemnation of a renowned poet, Archilochus, Grown fat on the harsh words of hate.

Archilochus was an iambic poet, working within a genre that licensed abusive and scurrilous verse – a regrettable tendency from the viewpoint of Pindar, whose own persona is intensely earnest, preaching to Hieron the need for moderation (wealth with wisdom) and submission to the divine will.

Reversing the chronological order was one such effect, as in Olympian VII dedicated to Diagoras of Rhodes, but this could also resemble a circular pattern, beginning with a culminating event, followed by scenes leading up to it, and ending with its restatement, as in his account of the Dioscuri in Nemean 10.

[119] His mythical accounts are edited for dramatic and graphic effects, usually unfolding through a few grand gestures against a background of large, often symbolic elements such as sea, sky, darkness, fire or mountain.

[93] Modern editors (e.g., Snell and Maehler in their Teubner edition), have assigned dates, securely or tentatively, to Pindar's victory odes, based on ancient sources and other grounds.

The resulting uncertainty is reflected in the chronology below, with question marks clustered around Nemean and Isthmian entries, and yet it still represents a fairly clear general timeline of Pindar's career as an epinician poet.

Some are only preserved as fragments via quotes by ancient sources and papyri unearthed by archeologists, as at Oxyrhynchus – in fact the extant works of most of the other canonic lyric poets have survived only in this tattered form.

Some scholars have traced a stemma through these manuscripts, for example Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who inferred from them the existence of a common source or archetype dated no earlier than the 2nd century AD, while others, such as C.M.

Bowra for example singled out seven manuscripts as his primary sources (see below), all featuring errors and/or gaps due to loss of folios and careless copying, and one arguably characterized by the dubious interpolations of Byzantine scholars.

He described it in one of his Sapphic poems, addressed to a friend, Iullus Antonius: Pindarum quisquis studet aemulari, Iule, ceratis ope Daedalea nititur pennis vitreo daturus nomina ponto.

monte decurrens velut amnis, imbres quem super notas aluere ripas, fervet immensusque ruit profundo Pindarus ore. (C.IV.II) Julus, whoever tries to rival Pindar, Flutters on wings of wax, a rude contriver Doomed like the son of Daedalus to christen Somewhere a shining sea.

The result is a poetry that by any standards deserves the name because it is based on a radiant vision of reality and fashioned with so subtle, so adventurous, and so dedicated an art that it is worthy to be an earthly counterpart of the songs which Pindar regards as the archetype of music on those lofty occasions when all discords are resolved and all misgivings obliterated by the power of the life-giving word.