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PINDAR, "by far the chief of all the lyrists," as Quintilian calls him, was born thirty-four years after Simônides, and survived him about twenty ( 522-448 B.C.). He is the first Greek writer for whose biography we have real documents. Not only are a great many of his extant poems datable, but tradition, which loved him for his grammatical difficulties as well as for his genius, has pre served a pretty good account of his outer circumstances. He was born at the village of Kynoskephalæ, in Bœotia; he was descended from the Ægîdæ, a clan of conquering invaders, probably 'Cadmean,' since the name ' Pindar' is found in Ephesus and Thêra. The country-bred Bœotian boy showed early a genius for music. The lyre, doubtless, he learned as a child: there was one Skopelînus at home, an uncle of the poet, or perhaps his step-father, who could teach him flute-playing. To learn choir-training and systematic music he had to go to Athens, to 'Athênoclês and Apollodôrus.' Tradition insisted on knowing something about his relation to the celebrities of the time. He was taught by Lasus of Hermionê; beaten in competition by his country-woman Corinna, though some extant lines of that poetess make against the story: "I praise not the gracious Myrtis, not I, for coming to contest with Pindar, a woman born!"And another anecdote only makes Corinna give him good advice -- "to sow with the hand, not with the whole sack,"when he was too profuse in his mythological ornaments.

The earliest poem we possess (Pyth. x.), written when Pindar was twenty -- or possibly twenty-four -- was a commission from the Aleuadæ, the princes of Pharsâlus, in Thessaly. This looks as if his reputation was made with astonishing rapidity. Soon afterwards we find him writing for the great nobles of Ægîna, patrons after his own heart, merchant princes of the highest Dorian ancestry. Then begins a career of pan-Hellenic celebrity: he is the guest of the great families of Rhodes, Tenedos, Corinth, Athens; of the great kings, Alexander of Macedon, Arkesilâus of Cyrene, Thêro of Acragas, and Hiero of Syracuse. It is as distinguished as that of Simônides, though perhaps less sincerely international. Pindar in his heart liked to write for 'the real nobility,' the descendants of Æacus and Heracles; his Sicilian kings are exceptions, but who could criticise a friendly king's claim to gentility? This ancient Dorian blood is evidently at the root of Pindar's view of life; even the way he asserts his equality with his patrons shows it. Simônides posed as the great man of letters. Pindar sometimes boasts of his genius, but leaves the impression of thinking more of his ancestry. In another thing he is unlike Simônides. Pindar was the chosen vessel of the priesthood in general, a votary of Rhea and Pan, and, above all, of the Dorian Apollo. He expounded the rehabilitation of traditional religion, which radiated from Delphi. He himself had special privileges at Delphi during his life, and his ghost afterwards was invited yearly to dine with the god. The priests of Zeus Ammon in the desert had a poem of his written in golden letters on their shrine.

These facts explain, as far as it needs explanation, the great flaw in Pindar's life. He lived through the Persian War; he saw the beginning of the great period of Greek enlightenment and progress. In both crises he stood, the unreasoning servant of sacerdotal tradition and racial prejudice, on the side of Bœotia and Delphi. One might have hoped that when Thebes joined the Persian, this poet, the friend of statesmen and kings in many countries, the student from Athens, would have protested. On the contrary, though afterwards when the war was won he could write Nemean iv. and the Dithyramb for Athens, in the crisis itself he made what Polybius calls (iv. 31) "a most shameful and injurious refusal": he wrote a poem of which two large dreamy lines are preserved, talking of peace and neutrality! It is typical of the man. Often in thinking over the best pieces of Pindar -- the majestic organ-playing, the grave strong magic of language, the lightning-flashes of halfrevealed mystery -- one wonders why this man is not counted the greatest poet that ever lived, why he has not done more, mattered more. The answer perhaps is that he was a poet and nothing else. He thought in music; he loved to live among great and beautiful images -- Heracles, Achilles, Perseus, Iâson, the daughters of Cadmus. When any part of his beloved saga repelled his moral sensitiveness, he glided away from it, careful not to express scepticism, careful also not to speak evil of a god. He loved poetry and music, especially his own. As a matter of fact, there was no poetry in the world like his, and when other people sang they jarred on him, he confesses, 'like crows.'

He loved religion, and is on the emotional side a great religious poet. The opening of Nemeanvi. is characteristic; so is the end of his last dated work ( Pyth.viii.): "Things of a day! what are we and what not? A dream about a shadow is man; yet when some god-given splendour falls, a glory of light comes over him and his life is sweet. Oh, Blessed Mother Ægîna, guard thou this city in the ways of freedom, with Zeus and Prince Eacus and Peleus and good Telamon and Achilles!"-- a rich depth of emotion, and then a childlike litany of traditional saints. His religious speculations are sometimes far from fortunate, as in Olympiani.; sometimes they lead to slight improvements. For instance, the old myth said that the nymph Corônis, loved by Phoebus, was secretly false to him; but a raven saw her, and told the god. Pindar corrects this: "the god's all - seeing mind"did not need the help of the raven. It is quite in the spirit of the Delphic movement in religion, the defensive reformation from the inside. Pindar is a moralist: parenthetical preaching is his favourite form of ornament; it comes in perfunctorily, like the verbal quibbles and assonances in Shakespeare. But the essence of his morality has not advanced much beyond Hesiod; save that where Hesiod tells his peasant to work and save, Pindar exhorts his nobleman to seek for honour and be generous. His ideal is derived straight from the Dorian aristocratic tradition. You must start by being well-born and brave and strong. You must then do two things, workand spend: work with body and soul; spend time and money and force, in pursuit of ἀρετà, 'goodness.' And what is 'goodness'? The sum of the qualities of the true Dorian man, descended from the god-born, labouring, fearless, unwearied fighter against the enemies of gods and men, Heracles. It is not absolutely necessary to be rich -- there were poor Spartans; nor good-looking -- some of his prize boxers were probably the reverse. But honour and renown you must have. Eccentric commentators have even translated ἀρετà as 'success in games' -- which it implied, much as the ideal of a mediæval knight implied success in the tourney.

Pindar is not false to this ideal. The strange air of abject worldliness which he sometimes wears, comes not because his idealism forsakes him, but because he has no sense of fact. The thing he loved was real heroism. But he could not see it out of its traditional setting; and when the setting was there, his own imagination sufficed to create the heroism. He was moved by the holy splendour of Delphi and Olympia; he liked the sense of distinction and remoteness from the vulgar which hung about the court of a great prince, and he idealised the merely powerful Hiero as easily as the really gallant Chromios. Not that he is ever conscious of identifying success with merit; quite the reverse. He is deeply impressed with the power of envy and dishonest arts -- the victory of the subtle Ionian Odysseus over the true Æacid Aias. It was this principle perhaps which helped him to comprehend why Simônides had such a reputation, and why a mob of Athenian sailors, with no physique and no landed property, should make such a stir in the world.

It is a curious freak of history that has preserved us only his 'Epinîkoi' -- songs for winners in the sacred games at Olympia, Pytho, Nemea, and the Isthmus. Of all his seventeen books -- "Hymns; Pæans; Dithyrambs, 2; Prosodia, 2; Parthenia, 3; Dance-songs, 2; Encômia; Dirges; Epinikoi, 4" -- the four we possess are certainly not the four we should have chosen. Yet there is in the kind of song something that suits Pindar's genius. For one thing, it does not really matter what he writes about. Two of his sublimest poems are on mule-races. If we are little interested by the fact that Xenophon of Corinth won the Stadium and the Five Bouts at Olympia in the fifth century B.C., neither are we much affected by the drowning of young Edward King in the seventeenth A.D. Poems like Lycidasand Olympianxiii. are independent of the facts that gave rise to them. And, besides, one cannot help feeling in Pindar a genuine fondness for horses and grooms and trainers. If a horse from Kynoskephalæ ever won a local race, the boy Pindar and his fellow-villagers must have talked over the points of that horse and the proceedings of his trainer with real affection. And whether or no the poet was paid extra for the references to Melêsias the 'professional,' and to the various uncles and grandfathers of his victors, he introduces them with a great semblance of spontaneous interest. It looks as if he was one of those un-self-conscious natures who do not much differentiate their emotions: he feels a thrill at the sight of Hiero's full-dress banquet board, of a wrestling bout, or of a horse-race, just as he does at the thought of the labour and glory of Heracles; and every thrill makes him sing.

Pindar was really three years younger than Æschylus; yet he seems a generation older than Simônides. His character and habits of thought are all archaic; so is his style. Like most other divisions of Greek literature, the lyric had been working from obscure force to lucidity. It had reached it in Simônides and Bacchylides. Pindar throws us back to Alcman, almost. He is hard even to read; can any one have understood him, sung? He tells us how his sweet song will "sail off from Ægina in the big ships and the little fishing-boats"as they separate homewards after the festival (Nem. v.). Yet one can scarcely believe that the Dorian fishermen could catch at one hearing much of so difficult a song. Perhaps it was only the tune they took, and the news of the victory. He was proud of his music; and Aristoxenus, the best judge we have, cannot praise it too highly. Even now, though every wreck of the music is lost -- the Messina musical fragment (of Pyth.i.) being spurious -- one feels that the words need singing to make them intelligible. The mere meaning and emotion of Pythianiv. or Olympian ii. -- to take two opposite types -- compel the words into a chant, varying between slow and fast, loud and low. The clause-endings ring like music: παλíγκοτον δαμασΘέν (Olymp.ii.) is much more than "angry and overborne."The king of the Epeans, when "into the deep channel running deathwards, he watched -- ȉξοισαν ἑàν πóλíγ-- his own city sink"(Olymp.x. 38), remains in one's mind by the echoing "my own" of the last words; so Pelops praying "by the grey sea-surge --οîος ἐν ὃρøνa+̨, alone in the darkness "-- in Olymp.i.; so that marvellous trumpet-crash in Pyth.iv. (ant. 5) on the last great word τιμáν. Many lovers of Pindar agree that the things that stay in one's mind, stay not as thoughts, but as music.

Few people care for Pindar now. He is hard in the original -- dialect, connection, state of mind, all are difficult to get into; and readers are wearied by the strange mixture of mules and the new moon and trainers and the Æacidæ. In translations -- despite the great skill of some of them -- he is perhaps more grotesquely naked than any poet; and that, as we saw above, for the usual reason, that he is nothing but a poet. There is little rhetoric, no philosophy, little human interest; only that fine bloom -what he calls ἄωτος -- which comes when the most sensitive language meets the most exquisite thought, and which "not even a god though he worked hard" could keep unhurt in another tongue.

Pindar was little influenced either by the movements of his own time or by previous writers. Stêsichorus and Homer have of course affected him. There are just a few notes that seem echoed from Æschylus: the eruption of Ætna is treated by both; but Pindar seems quite by himself in his splendid description ( Pyth.i.). It is possible that his great line λυ+̑σέ δε Ζεὺς ὴøΘιτος Tιτâνας, is suggested by the Prometheus trilogy, of which it is the great lesson -- "Everlasting Zeus set free the Titans."