Pindar (Morice)/Chapter 3

by Francis David Morice

 

CHAPTER III.

PINDAR'S LIFE AND BIOGRAPHERS.

It has seemed desirable to preface the story of Pindar's life with some account, however imperfect, of the general character of Greek Choral poetry. By realising the essential connection of its loftiest forms with the mysteries of Greek religion and the inspiring legends of the Heroic Age, we are enabled better to understand the peculiar veneration which the Greeks felt for their greatest choric poet. Plato^[1] speaks of him as belonging to a class of poets who deserve the title of "divine." And it is clear, on abundant evidence, that he was generally regarded by the Greeks not simply as a great artist, but as an inspired and saintly sage, the author of works deserving a place beside those of Homer among the Sacred Books of the nation. This view of Pindar's character is illustrated by various legends, which we shall notice in their place,—legends which, however historically baseless, were repeated and believed all over Greece,—of a special and mysterious intercourse between the poet and the unseen world, and of marvellous signs of divine favour towards him manifested in his lifetime, and even after his death.

It seemed desirable also that the reader should form some preliminary idea of the great demand for choral poetry among the Greeks of Pindar's day, and the qualifications needed by a poet in order to supply that demand adequately. Such qualifications would include a familiar knowledge, both practical and theoretical, of the whole range of poetical, musical, and spectacular art, and of the methods by which each branch could be made to co-operate most successfully in producing a required effect. Further, the mythological treatment of his themes demanded from the poet a minute and comprehensive acquaintance with the whole body of Greek divinity, including not merely the legends common to the whole people, and the established articles of mythological belief stereotyped once for all by a Homer or a Hesiod, but the floating local traditions of every petty tribe, and town, and even family. And from this vast store he had to select with infinite tact and discretion, topics, not only suitable to his occasion, but adapted to please a mixed audience, whose peculiar religious and political prejudices and theories of orthodoxy in matters mythological he could not with impunity disregard. On two points at least we shall have gained light by considering the combination of gifts and training necessary to produce such artists, and the wide field of occupation which, would be open to them when they appeared, For so we shall better understand how it was, that—unlike most Greek literary men of that day, unlike the great tragedians and historians of Athens—the choral poets almost of necessity adopted their art as a regular profession, and derived from it, not fame alone, but a substantial livelihood. We shall also better understand the value set by their countrymen on the few really eminent professors of so difficult an art, and the eagerness of patrons to secure their services. And thus we shall be prepared to believe the stories preserved to us by Pindar's biographers, of kings and governments vying with each other to do the poet honour, and establishing with him relations of personal and quasi-political friendship.

We must accept the main outlines of Pindar's life as they are related by the somewhat questionable authorities to whom we owe all our evidence on the subject.

Pindar, they tell us, was a Bœotian, born either in Thebes or in an adjacent village, about the year B.C. 522. By a singular coincidence, the great master of the Dorian lyre was born during the celebration of the Pythia, the quinquennial festival of Apollo, the God of Delphi, whom the Greeks worshipped as the especial patron of Dorian nationality, of poetry, and especially of the lyre. This coincidence is known to us from Pindar's own express statement,^[2] and it is almost the only fact of his life which can be regarded as unquestionably ascertained. His father's name was apparently Daiphantus, for Scopelinus, whom some authors treat as the poet's father, seems really to have been an uncle or stepfather who superintended his early musical education. The family of Pindar boasted an early connection with Sparta, and a descent from the hero Ægeus. So he tells us in an extant Ode,^[3]

"From Sparta springs my own ancestral boast, as legends tell.
Sprung from thence, to Thera's land
(Heroes of Ægid stock) my fathers came."

But elsewhere he claims as his ancestress the Arcadian nymph Metope, mother of Thebe the mythical foundress of the Theban nation: he tells us of

"My mother's mother bright, Stymphalus-sprung!
—Metope she, that Thebe bare."^[4]

His family, it is said, were musicians by inheritance, and excelled especially in flute-playing, the national art of Bœotia. Through that country the river Cephisus ran into the Copaic lake, and both river and lake were celebrated for the reed-beds from which the Theban flute-makers obtained their materials.

Pindar rapidly learned all that Scopelinus could teach him, and was then transferred by him to study the lyre at Athens under the eminent Dithyrambic composer, Lasus of Hermione. At the age of sixteen we hear of him still at Athens, installed, it would seem, on his own account as a trainer of choruses. Between this period and the performance of his earliest extant Ode (B.C. 502) he returned to Thebes, and met, as was mentioned in the preceding chapter, the poetess Corinna of Tanagra. The story there related of her playful rebuke, "One should sow with the hand, and not with the sack," exhibits the poetess in the character of a good-natured superior. Other legends tell of a rivalry between them: we hear of musical contests in which Corinna was declared victor,—five times in succession, says Ælian;^[5] "whereupon"—adds this author with delicious gravity—"he called her a pig!" Pausanias^[6] suggests that the good looks of the lady had something to do with the judges' verdict; but remarks, too, that they may have preferred her dialect, as easier and more familiar, to Pindar's super-accurate Doric. A third and hardly consistent tradition tells us that Corinna blamed another poetess called Myrtis for daring, in spite of her sex, to enter the lists against Pindar.

At the age of twenty (B.C. 502) Pindar's reputation as a rising poet seems to have been fairly established. A prize in the Pythian games had fallen to a young Thessalian named Hippocleas, and a noble countryman of the victor, a member of the almost royal house of the Aleuadæ, invited Pindar to celebrate the success in a Choral Ode. This circumstance produced the Tenth Pythian, the earliest of Pindar's extant Odes. It exhibits little or no trace of the heedless youthful exuberance reprehended by Corinna in his earlier efforts. Its mythological element, if not introduced with quite the dexterity which delights us in his finest poems, is yet not excessive, and is pleasing in itself. Pleasing also is the address of the young poet to his noble patron,^[7] grateful for the opportunity of distinguishing himself, yet modestly conscious that he deserves the confidence placed in him:—

"In friendly Thorax rests my trust, who, toiling for my grace,
Hath yoked this car of song with steeds in fourfold trace,
And gives me guidance back for guidance, love for love."

By "yoking the four-horse car of song," the poet means in plain prose, "giving the commission to produce this Ode, with its four ternaries of Strophe, Antistrophe, and Epode." From this time to the day of his death an endless succession of similar commissions streamed in upon him from all parts of Greece. His fame flew east and west, north and south, from Rhodes to Sicily, and from Thessaly to Cyrene on the far-off coast of Africa. The royal families of Agrigentum and Syracuse supplied him with liberal patrons, and he is believed to have been more than once received as an honoured guest in the palace of Hiero, who for eleven years, from B.C. 478 to B.C. 467, reigned in the latter city. Throughout this period, and for about ten years after it, Pindar's genius appears at its greatest height. Afterwards we seem to trace a certain decline of vigour. Yet there are noble passages in his later poems: and even the latest have their own peculiar charm of serenity and kindliness,—a tranquil sunset, as it were, succeeding not unmeetly to the fiery splendours of his noontide course.

Thebes, the native city of Pindar, continued to the last his home. There, beside the fountain of Dirce, the traditional site of his house was pointed out some six hundred years after the poet's death to the traveller Pausanias. Another Pausanias, it was said, had once sacked Thebes at the head of a Spartan army, but had spared the house which bore the inscription,

"Burn not the roof of Pindar the poet!"

Sober history indeed refutes this story. Pausanias did, it is true, in the year B.C. 395, lead a Spartan army against Thebes, but he retired baffled from before its walls, and forfeited his kingdom by his retreat. But there is no such reason for disbelieving the similar tale that the house of Pindar was spared by Alexander the Great,^[8] when in B.C. 336 he destroyed Thebes, and sold its inhabitants into slavery. The English reader will remember the lines in which Milton has made this tale immortal:—

"The great Emathian conqueror bade spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground."^[9]

In this house the poet lived and wrote, "drinking," as he tells us,^[10] "the pleasant waters" of the sacred fountain hard by. Once at least his relations with the rulers of his city became unpleasantly strained. In a poem composed for an Athenian festival his compliments to Athens provoked the jealousy of the Theban government, and a fine was imposed on the poet, which was paid by his Athenian friends. Yet his affection for his native town remained unaltered. In the opening of his First Isthmian Ode, he declares that the praise of his "mother Thebe" is, and must be ever, a theme to which all his other commissions must give way:—

"Whate'er of toil my busy soul did weave
To thy high call I yield. ***** Is there a theme so dear
As parents' praise to children's ear?"—(S.)

He turned a deaf ear to the invitations of his friend King Hiero, who, we are assured, offered him an honourable position in Syracuse. The poets Simonides and Bacchylides were already domiciled in Hiero's court, but Pindar preferred his independence and his home in Thebes. "I would live for myself, and not for another," he said, when questioned afterwards on the subject.^[11]

From his Theban home Pindar made frequent visits to friends in Ægina and elsewhere. He was present on several occasions at the festivals of Olympia, Nemea, and the Isthmus. At Delphi also he was a familiar guest with the priests of the temple, and an iron chair on which he sat to conduct his Hymns was long exhibited among the curiosities of the place. More than one foreign city complimented Pindar by appointing him their "Proxenus," an office regarded always as conferring distinction on the recipient, with duties somewhat analogous to those of our modern "consuls." He was Proxenus for Athens, and also for some Achæan town,^[12] perhaps Dyme.

In Thebes Pindar lived, and in Thebes he was buried, yet he died (we are told) in a foreign city. At the age of eighty (B.C. 442) he had left his home to attend a festival at Argos. And there, in the public theatre, surrounded by the favourite and most familiar associations of his life, the pageantry of religion and the "flower of music," the old man fell suddenly into the arms of a youthful friend, and expired. His daughters Protomache and Eumetis, who seem to have inherited some portion of their father's talents, conveyed his ashes to Thebes; and an ancient epigram commemorates the loudness of their lamentation, and pays a compliment to their musical attainments. Of his wife Megacleia, and his son Daiphantus, this epigram says nothing. Perhaps both were dead. There is a story of a proposed marriage between one of these daughters and a prosperous citizen. But the father's caution broke off the match. The suitor might be prosperous now, he said, but he was not the sort of man to prosper long. However, we hear of descendants of Pindar at Thebes at the time of its destruction by Alexander. So perhaps the father relented, or the lady may have found a more eligible suitor, or Pindar's family may have been larger than his biographers were aware.

The great poet was gone, but his fame survived him. The Athenians raised his statue in their city; the Rhodians engraved his Seventh Olympian Ode in golden letters on the temple of the Lindian Athene. We have already noticed the preservation at Delphi of his iron chair; and there too, long after his death, a singular custom connected with the temple services guaranteed the continuance of his fame. Either, as some say, at every sacrifice the priest invoked the shade of Pindar to take his share of the offerings, or, according to another version of the legend, every evening as the temple was closed for the night the sacristan paused: "Pindar to supper with the god!" he cried. Then the doors were shut, and there in the solemn darkness of the sanctuary, screened from mortal eye by walls through which no window was suffered to admit, even in daytime, one ray of profane light, the god and his poet-guest, as was piously believed, sat banqueting together till the morning.

The authority of Chamæleon (circ. B.C. 330) is cited for the following legend of Pindar's boyhood: Tired with hunting on the slopes of Helicon, he had flung himself down to sleep, when a swarm of bees settled on his lips, and filled his mouth with their honey. Some accounts transform this incident into a dream. But in fact the myth, for myth it plainly is—an allegory of the simplest kind—is told, not of Pindar only, but of Homer, of Plato, and even of St Ambrose.^[13] Another yet more marvellous legend told how the god Pan had been heard by belated wayfarers singing a Pæan of Pindar's between the peaks of Helicon and Cithæron. His death was made an occasion for other myths. The oracle of Ammon promised him the greatest earthly boon, and his death was the fulfilment of the promise. The goddess of the nether world, Persephone, appeared to him in a dream; and, complaining that she alone of deities had been left unhonoured by his muse, added that he should praise her yet in the land of the dead. In ten days the promise was fulfilled. The poet died at Argos, and immediately after, his spectre appeared to an aged dame in Thebes, recited a new hymn to Persephone, some portion of which she was able to commit to writing, and then vanished for ever into the spirit-world from which it had come.

A late poet, Leonidas, sums his character up in a brief epitaph, which may be rendered thus:—

"To strangers kind, yet to his townsmen dear,
Pindar, the Muses' minister, rests here."

Such is the traditional biography of Pindar. But how much of it may be regarded as trustworthy? We might naturally have supposed that the contemporaries who cherished so proudly and so fondly the fame of Pindar, would have been careful to preserve and transmit to posterity a full and trustworthy record of his life. And, in fact, we possess at least four professed biographies of the poet, agreeing fairly even in their minuter details, and appearing at first sight to supply materials for a tolerably exhaustive and consistent memoir. But on closer examination we find that the evidence furnished by these biographies is by no means of such a character as to deserve unquestioning acceptance. The earliest of them can scarcely have been compiled before the eleventh century of our era—more than fourteen hundred years after the death of their subject. And though they clearly all embody a literary tradition of far greater antiquity, yet even this tradition cannot possibly be traced back beyond a period separated by at least a full century from the latest date which can be assigned for Pindar's death. The earliest authority to whom any of their statements can be traced was Chamæleon of Heraclea, a philosopher trained by Aristotle in that Peripatetic school which was the cradle of Greek literary biography. But Chamæleon himself belongs to an age separated by several generations from that of Pindar. His 'Book on Pindar,' therefore, even if it were still extant, would not possess the value of a genuine contemporary record. We should require to be satisfied, before admitting its authority, that it was based upon older and authentic accounts of the poet's life. But it is highly improbable that any such account in writing existed before the Peripatetic period, Chamæleon can scarcely have had before him much evidence beyond such as was embodied in oral traditions current among the learned of his own day, Pindar was, no doubt, to these something more than a mere name: they had a fairly distinct conception of his personality, and a general idea of the outlines of his life. But this idea probably included as much of fiction as of fact. Some elements in it were derived, no doubt, from genuine traditions, handed down from father to son in the families of Pindar and his patrons. But others were due to faulty inferences from these traditions, or to misinterpretations of the poet's own language about himself, or to the existence among the Greeks of a certain stock of floating legends with a continual tendency to reproduce themselves in connection with the name of any illustrious poet—stories of juvenile triumphs, defeated rivals, royal compliments, besides more obviously mythical tales of divine apparitions, and of mysterious influences exerted by poets over the brute creation. A mass of such legend seems to have crystallised round Pindar's name almost m his lifetime, certamly before Chamæleon attempted to write his memoir. And considering that Chamæleon's purpose was probably rather literary than strictly historical, and that his 'Book on Pindar' was only one volume of a series, it is unlikely that in this case he took any special pains to sift his evidence, and distinguish in it the actual from the mythical. As a matter of fact, the one statement about Pindar's life, which was unquestionably derived by later writers from Chamæleon's work, is one of the most unmistakable myths in the whole story.

Chamæleon's book, however, seems to have long held its ground as the standard biography of Pindar. It supplied, no doubt, a starting-point for the researches of the Alexandrian librarian, Aristophanes (in the third century B.C.), to whom we owe our present arrangement of the Odes. And probably it formed the basis of the lost 'Life of Pindar' by Plutarch, who flourished in the latter part of the first century A.D. Athenæus quotes it (about A.D. 230); and although of the extant "Lives of Pindar" only one—that by Eustathius—refers to it by name, all probably derived from it, mediately or immediately, the greater part of their materials.

It is sometimes possible to verify and extend the meagre records of a poet's life, as presented to us in professed biographies, by a reference to occasional notices of the poet in the writings of other authors, or to internal evidences supplied by the poet's own works. But from neither of these sources can we get much information as to the life of Pindar. Herodotus quotes him, but tells us nothing about him. Thucydides does not mention him at all. Plato speaks in high terms of his writings, but has not a word to say on the subject of his life. Quite late writers, such as Plutarch and Ælian, supply an anecdote or a statement here and there; but on what authority we know not, nor, in any case, do they add much to the evidence of the extant "Lives." It is. evident from this silence on the part of his contemporaries, and of the generation which succeeded them, that Pindar played no conspicuous part in the history of his times. The complaint of Plato,^[14] that no Greek poet ever made his mark as a statesman, or soldier, or mechanical discoverer, is well known. There was exaggeration in it; but in the main it was true, and the case of Pindar may serve to illustrate it. Nor can we with much confidence attempt to recover from the works of Pindar such an autobiography, all the more valuable because undesigned, as the ingenuity of modern critics has elicited from the fragments of Theognis. Of the scenes and places which he pictures in such vivid colours, we know not which he had seen in the flesh and which with the eye of imagination. If he describes himself as "guiding the bark of song" to Rhodes, or "shipping a cargo" of encomium for Sicily, or leading the revels "round Hiero's hospitable board,"—these descriptions may indeed be the poetical record of veritable travels, but we can never be sure that the apparent kernel of fact is, in truth, more solid, less ideal, than the imagery which invests it. A consistent Euhemeristic interpretation of a poet's allusions to his own movements would often lead us to strange results. Not every modern bard who tells us of his "slumbers on Parnassus' brow" can be inferred to have trod in fact the soil of Greece. Future biographers of the present Poet-Laureate will scarcely record for posterity, on the evidence of his own early poems, his marriage with "the gardener's daughter," or his visit to "Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold" "in the golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid."

Practically, then, our evidence for the facts of Pindar's life consists of four biographies, compiled fully fourteen hundred years after the poet's death, and forming the latest links in a chain of tradition which cannot be traced beyond the school of Aristotle. It is impossible to accept such evidence without hesitation; but we have, in fact, no other. At least we may receive it as evidence, if not to the actual facts of Pindar's life, yet to the general impression produced by that life on the minds of succeeding generations. Questionable at best as records of the actual historical Pindar, these biographies represent to us at any rate the Pindar of tradition—Pindar as educated Greeks and modern scholars, following their lead, have been wont to picture him. The best of them, probably, and certainly the fullest, is that prefixed to his 'Commentaries on Pindar' by Eustathius, Archbishop of Thessalonica—a learned and laborious scholar of the twelfth century. A second, of unknown date and authorship, but probably not later than the last mentioned, is known as the 'Vita Vratislavensis,' having been found in an ancient manuscript at Breslau. A third is ascribed to Thomas Magister, a dull and blundering pedant of the fourteenth century; and a fourth—the oldest probably of all, but extremely meagre and unsatisfactory—to the lexicographer Suidas, of whom we only know that he lived at least as early as Eustathius, and at least as late as the close of the eleventh century. When the great modern scholar Boeckh published his magnificent edition of Pindar, the work of Eustathius had unluckily disappeared, and was supposed to have been lost for ever; but it has since been unearthed and made accessible to modern students, first by Tafel, in 1832, and again, in 1835, by E. W. Schneidewin. From the contents of these four biographies, and from the scanty allusions to Pindar which are scattered over the Greek Anthology, and the writings of such late authors as Plutarch, Ælian, and Athenæus, is derived nearly all that modern research has been able to recover for us of the life of the Theban poet.

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1. Meno, 81 B.
2. Fr. 205 (Boeckh).
3. Pyth. v. 68.
4. Ol. vi. 84.—Stymphalus was a city of Arcadia.
5. Var. Hist. xiii. 24.
6. Bœot. xxii.
7. Pyth. x. 64.
8. Æl. Var. Hist. xiii. 7: Dio Chrys. Orat. II. de Regno: Eustath. Proœm. 28, &c.
9. Milton, Sonnet III.
10. Ol. vi. 85.
11. Eustath. Proœm. 26.
12. Nem. vii. 65.
13. M. Villemain compares the well-known legend of Horace's boyhood, related by himself—Odes, iii. 4. We might add the tale of Stesichorus and the nightingale—Anthol. Gr. vol. i. p. 31 (Tauchnitz ed.)
14. Republic, x.