The Extant Odes of Pindar - Pindar
THE EXTANT
ODES OF PINDAR
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH
with
INTRODUCTION AND SHORT NOTES
BY
ERNEST MYERS, M.A.
_Sometime Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford_
1904
_First edition printed 1874._
_Reprinted (with corrections) 1884, 1888, 1892, 1895, 1899, 1904_
SON OF THE LIGHTNING, FAIR AND FIERY STAR,
STRONG-WINGED IMPERIAL PINDAR, VOICE DIVINE,
LET THESE DEEP DRAUGHTS OF THY ENCHANTED WINE
LIFT ME WITH THEE IN SOARINGS HIGH AND FAR
PROUDER THAN PEGASEAN, OR THE CAR
WHEREIN APOLLO RAPT THE HUNTRESS MAID.
SO LET ME RANGE MINE HOUR, TOO SOON TO FADE
INTO STRANGE PRESENCE OF THE THINGS THAT ARE.
YET KNOW THAT EVEN AMID THIS JARRING NOISE
OF HATES, LOVES, CREEDS, TOGETHER HEAPED AND HURLED,
SOME ECHO FAINT OF GRACE AND GRANDEUR STIRS
FROM THY SWEET HELLAS, HOME OF NOBLE JOYS.
FIRST FRUIT AND BEST OF ALL OUR WESTERN WORLD;
WHATE'ER WE HOLD OF BEAUTY, HALF IS HERS.
INTRODUCTION.
Probably no poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar
finds so few and so infrequent readers. The causes are not far to
seek: in the first and most obvious place comes the great difficulty
of his language, in the second the frequent obscurity of his thought,
resulting mainly from his exceeding allusiveness and his abrupt
transitions, and in the third place that amount of monotony which must
of necessity attach to a series of poems provided for a succession of
similar occasions.
It is as an attempt towards obviating the first of these hindrances
to the study of Pindar, the difficulty of his language, that this
translation is of course especially intended. To whom and in what
cases are translations of poets useful? To a perfect scholar in the
original tongue they are superfluous, to one wholly ignorant of it
they are apt to be (unless here and there to a Keats) meaningless,
flat, and puzzling. There remains the third class of those who have a
certain amount of knowledge of a language, but not enough to
enable them to read unassisted its more difficult books without an
expenditure of time and trouble which is virtually prohibitive. It
is to this class that a translation ought, it would seem, chiefly to
address itself. An intelligent person of cultivated literary taste,
and able to read the easier books in an acquired language, will feel
himself indebted to a hand which unlocks for him the inner chambers
of a temple in whose outer courts he had already delighted to wander.
Without therefore saying that the merely 'English reader' may never
derive pleasure and instruction from a translation of a foreign poet,
for to this rule our current version of the Hebrew psalmists and
prophets furnish one marked exception at least--still, it is probably
to what may be called the half-learned class that the translator must
preeminently look to find an audience.
The other causes of Pindar's unpopularity to which reference was made
above, the obscurity of his thought and the monotony of his subjects,
will in great measure disappear by means of attentive study of the
poems themselves, and of other sources from which may be gathered an
understanding of the region of thought and feeling in which they move.
In proportion to our familiarity not only with Hellenic mythology and
history, but with Hellenic life and habits of thought generally, will
be our readiness and facility in seizing the drift and import of what
Pindar says, in divining what has passed through his mind: and in his
case perhaps even more than in the case of other poets, this facility
will increase indefinitely with our increasing acquaintance with his
works and with the light thrown on each part of them by the rest[1].
The monotony of the odes, though to some extent unquestionably and
unavoidably real, is to some extent also superficial and in appearance
only. The family of the victor, or his country, some incident of his
past, some possibility of his future life, suggest in each case some
different legendary matter, some different way of treating it, some
different application of it, general or particular, or both. Out
of such resources Pindar is inexhaustible in building up in subtly
varying forms the splendid structure of his song.
Yet doubtless the drawbacks in reading Pindar, though they may be
largely reduced, will always in some degree exist: we shall always
wish that he was easier to construe, that his allusions to things
unfamiliar and sometimes undiscoverable to us were less frequent, that
family pride had not made it customary for him to spend so many lines
on an enumeration of prizes won elsewhere and at other times by the
victor of the occasion or by his kin. Such drawbacks can only fall
into insignificance when eclipsed by consideration of the far more
than counterbalancing attractions of the poems, of their unique and
surpassing interest, poetical, historical, and moral.
Of Pindar as a poet it is hard indeed to speak adequately, and
almost as hard to speak briefly, for a discussion of his poetical
characteristics once begun may wander far before even a small part
has been said of what might be. To say that to his poetry in supreme
degree belong the qualities of force, of vividness, often of
impressive weight, of a lofty style, seeming to be the expression of
a like personality, of a mastery of rhythm and metre and imaginative
diction, of a profoundly Hellenic spirit modified by an unmistakable
individuality, above all of a certain sweep and swiftness as of the
flight of an eagle's wing--to say all this would be to suggest some of
the most obvious features of these triumphal odes; and each of these
qualities, and many more requiring exacter delineation, might be
illustrated with numberless instances which even in the faint image
of a translation would furnish ample testimony[2]. But as this
introduction is intended for those who purpose reading Pindar's
poetry, or at any rate the present translation of it, for themselves,
I will leave it to them to discover for themselves the qualities which
have given Pindar his high place among poets, and will pass on to
suggest briefly his claims to interest us by reason of his place in
the history of human action and human thought.
We know very little of Pindar's life. He was born in or about the year
B.C. 522, at the village of Kynoskephalai near Thebes. He was thus a
citizen of Thebes and seems to have always had his home there. But he
travelled among other states, many of which have been glorified by his
art. For his praise of Athens, 'bulwark of Hellas,' the city which at
Artemision 'laid the foundation of freedom,' the Thebans are said to
have fined him; but the generous Athenians paid the fine, made him
their Proxenos, and erected his statue at the public cost. For the
magnificent Sicilian princes, Hieron of Syracuse and Theron of
Akragas, not unlike the Medici in the position they held, Pindar wrote
five of the longest of his extant odes, and probably visited them in
Sicily. But he would not quit his home to be an ornament of their
courts. When asked why he did not, like Simonides, accept the
invitations of these potentates to make his home with them, he
answered that he had chosen to live his own life, and not to be the
property of another. He died at the age of 79, that is, probably, in
the year 443, twelve years before the Peloponnesian war began. Legend
said that he died in the theatre of Argos, in the arms of Theoxenos,
the boy in whose honour he wrote a Skolion of which an immortal
fragment remains to us. Other myths gathered round his name. It was
said that once when in childhood he had fallen asleep by the way 'a
bee had settled on his lips and gathered honey,' and again that
'he saw in a dream that his mouth was filled with honey and the
honeycomb;' that Pan himself learnt a poem of his and rejoiced to sing
it on the mountains; that finally, while he awaited an answer from
the oracle of Ammon, whence he had enquired what was best for man,
Persephone appeared to him in his sleep and said that she only of the
gods had had no hymn from him, but that he should make her one shortly
when he had come to her; and that he died within ten days of the
vision.
Two several conquerors of Thebes, Pausanias of Sparta and Alexander of
Macedon,
'bade spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground.'
At Delphi they kept with reverence his iron chair, and the priest of
Apollo cried nightly as he closed the temple, 'Let Pindar the poet go
in unto the supper of the god.'
Thus Pindar was contemporary with an age of Greek history which
justifies the assertion of his consummate interest for the student of
Hellenic life in its prime. It was impossible that a man of his
genius and temperament should have lived through these times without
representing to us with breadth and intensity the spirit that was in
them, and there are several points in Pindar's circumstances which
make his relation to his age peculiarly interesting. We may look on
him as in some points supplementary to the great Athenian dramatists,
whose works are doubtless far the most valuable literary legacy of the
time. Perhaps however the surpassing brilliance of Athenian literature
and history has made us somewhat prone to forget the importance of
non-Athenian elements in the complex whole of Hellenic life and
thought. Athens was the eye of Hellas, nay, she had at Marathon and
Salamis made good her claim to be called the saving arm, but there
were other members not to be forgotten if we would picture to
ourselves the national body in its completeness.
Pindar was a Boeotian, of a country not rich in literary or indeed any
kind of intellectual eminence, yet by no means to be ignored in an
estimate of the Hellenic race. Politically indeed it only rises into
pre-eminence under Epameinondas; before and afterwards Boeotian
policy under the domination of Thebes is seldom either beneficent or
glorious: it must be remembered, however, that the gallant Plataeans
also were Boeotians. The people of Boeotia seem to have had generally
an easy, rather sensually inclined nature, which accorded with their
rich country and absence of nautical and commercial enterprise and
excitement, but in their best men this disposition remains only in the
form of a genial simplicity. Pelopidas in political, and Plutarch and
Pausanias in literary history, will be allowed to be instances of
this. That the poetry which penetrated Hellenic life was not wanting
in Boeotia we have proof enough in the existence of the Sacred Band,
that goodly fellowship of friends which seems to have united what
Hallam has called the three strongest motives to enthusiastic action
that have appeared in history, patriotism, chivalric honour, and
religion. Nor is there any nobler figure in history than that of
Epameinondas.
One fact indeed there is which must always make the thought of
Pindar's Theban citizenship painful to us, and that is the shameful
part taken by Thebes in the Persian war, when compulsion of her
exposed situation, and oligarchical cabal within her walls, drew her
into unholy alliance with the barbarian invader. Had it been otherwise
how passionately pure would Pindar's joy have uttered itself when the
'stone of Tantalos' that hung over the head of Hellas was smitten into
dust in that greatest crisis of the fortunes of humanity. He exults
nobly as it is, he does all honour to Athens, 'bulwark of Hellas,' but
the shame of his own city, his 'mother' Thebes, must have caused him a
pang as bitter as a great soul has ever borne.
For his very calling of song-writer to all Hellenic states without
discrimination, especially when the songs he had to write were of the
class which we still possess, triumphal odes for victories in those
great games which drew to them all men of Hellenic blood at the feet
of common deities, and which with each recurring festival could even
hush the clamour of war in an imperious Truce of God--such a calling
and such associations must have cherished in him the passion for
Panhellenic brotherhood and unanimity, even had there not been much
else both within and without him to join to the same generous end. It
was the time when Panhellenic feeling was probably stronger than ever
before or after. Before, the states had been occupied in building
up their own polities independently; the Hellenic activity had been
dispersing itself centrifugally among the trans-marine colonies,
and those of Italy and Sicily seemed at one time to make it doubtful
whether the nucleus of civilization were to be there or in the
mother-country. But by the time of the Persian war the best energies
of the race had concentrated themselves between the Aegean and Ionian
seas; and the supreme danger of the war had bound the states together
against the common enemy and taught them to forget smaller differences
in the great strife between Hellene and barbarian. Yet again when that
supreme danger was past the old quarrels arose anew more deadly and
more complicated: instead of a Persian there was a Peloponnesian war,
and the Peloponnesian war in its latter stages came, by virtue of the
political principles involved, to partake much of the character of
a civil war. But the time of Pindar, of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, of
Pheidias, of Polygnotos, was that happy interval when Hellas had
beaten off the barbarian from her throat and had not yet murdered
herself. And Pindar's imagination and generosity were both kindled by
the moment; there was no room in his mind for border squabbles, for
commercial jealousies, for oligarchic or democratic envy: these things
were overridden by a sentiment of nationality wanting indeed in
many circumstances which modern nationalities deem essential to the
existence of such sentiment, and many of which are really essential to
its permanence--yet a sentiment which no other nation ever before or
since can have possessed in the peculiar lustre which it then wore in
Hellas; for no other nation has ever before or since known what it was
to stand alone immeasurably advanced at the head of the civilization
of the world.
Pindar was of a noble family, of the house of the Aigeidai, and it is
probable that his kinsmen, or some of them, may have taken the side of
oligarchy in the often recurring dissensions at Thebes, but of this
we know nothing certain. He himself seems to have taken no part in
politics. When he speaks on the subject in his odes it is not with the
voice of a partisan. An ochlocracy is hateful to him, but if he shows
himself an 'aristocrat' it is in the literal and etymological meaning
of the word. Doubtless if Pindar had been asked where the best
servants of the state in public life were most likely to be found he
would have answered that it would be among those ancient families in
whose veins ran the blood of gods and demigods, who had spent blood
and money for the city's honour, championing her in war or in the
mimic strife of the games, who had honourable traditions to be guided
by and an honourable name to lose or save. These things were seldom
undervalued by Hellenic feeling: even in Athens, after it was already
the headquarters of the democratic principle, the noble and wealthy
families obtained, not probably without wisdom of their own in loyally
accepting a democratic position, as fair a place and prospects as
anywhere in Hellas. But that, when the noble nature, the [Greek:
aretae], which traditions of nobility ought to have secured, was
lacking, then wealth and birth were still entitled to power, this
was a doctrine repugnant utterly to Pindar's mind: nor would his
indignation slumber when he saw the rich and highborn, however gifted,
forgetting at any time that their power was a trust for the community
and using it for their own selfish profit. An 'aristocrat' after
Pindar's mind would assuredly have a far keener eye to his duties
than to his rights, would consider indeed that in his larger share of
duties lay his infinitely most precious right.
But he 'loved that beauty should go beautifully;' personal excellence
of some kind was in his eyes essential; but on this he would fain
shed outward radiance and majesty. His imagination rejoiced in
splendour--splendour of stately palace--halls where the columns were
of marble and the entablature of wrought gold, splendour of temples of
gods where the sculptor's waxing art had brought the very deities to
dwell with man, splendour of the white-pillared cities that glittered
across the Aegean and Sicilian seas, splendour of the holy Panhellenic
games, of whirlwind chariots and the fiery grace of thoroughbreds,
of the naked shapely limbs of the athlete man and boy. On this
characteristic of Pindar it is needless to dwell, for there are not
many odes of those remaining which do not impress it on our minds.
And it is more with him than a mere manner in poetical style. The
same defect which we feel more or less present in all poets of
antiquity--least of all perhaps in Virgil and Sophokles, but even in
them somewhat--a certain want of widely sympathetic tenderness, this
is unquestionably present in Pindar. What of this quality may have
found expression in his lost poems, especially the Dirges, we can
scarcely guess, but in his triumphal odes it hardly appears at all,
unless in the touches of tender gracefulness into which he softens
when speaking of the young. And we find this want in him mainly
because objects of pity, such as especially elicit that quality of
tenderness, are never or seldom present to Pindar's mind. He sees evil
only in the shape of some moral baseness, falsehood, envy, arrogance,
and the like, to be scathed in passing by the good man's scorn, or
else in the shape of a dark mystery of pain, to be endured by those on
whom it causelessly falls in a proud though undefiant silence. It was
not for him, as for the great tragedians, to 'purge the mind by pity
and fear,' for those passions had scarcely a place in his own mind or
in the minds of those of whom he in his high phantasy would fain have
had the world consist. And as in this point somewhat, so still more in
others, does Pindar remind us, even more than might have been expected
in a contemporary, of Aeschylus. The latter by virtue of his Athenian
nurture as well as of his own greater natural gifts reveals to us
a greater number of thoughts, and those more advanced and more
interesting than we find in Pindar, but the similarity in moral temper
and tone is very striking, as also is the way in which we see this
temper acting on their beliefs. Both hold strongly, as is the wont
of powerful minds in an age of stability as opposed to an age of
transition, to the traditions and beliefs on which the society around
them rests, but both modify these traditions and beliefs according
to the light which arises in them, and which is as much moral as
intellectual light. In so doing they are indeed in harmony with the
best instincts of the society around them, but they lead and guide
such instincts and give them shape and definiteness. In the Oresteaen
trilogy of Aeschylus we have an ever-memorable assertion of the
supreme claims of human morality to human allegiance, of the eternal
truth that humanity can know no object of reverence and worship except
itself idealised, its own virtues victorious over its own vices, and
existing in the greatest perfection which it can at any given time
conceive. Somewhat the same lesson as that of the Oresteia is taught
later, with more of sweetness and harmony, but not with more force,
in the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophokles. And in Pindar we see the same
tendencies inchoate. Like Aeschylus he does by implication subordinate
to morality both politics and religion. He ignores or flatly denies
tales that bring discredit on the gods; he will only bow down to them
when they have the virtues he respects in man. Yet he, like Aeschylus
and Sophokles, does so bow down, sincerely and without hesitation, and
that poets of their temper could do so was well indeed for poetry.
By rare and happy fortune they were inspired at once by the rich and
varied presences of mythology, 'the fair humanities of old religion,'
and also by the highest aspirations of an age of moral and
intellectual advance. We do not of course always, or even often, find
the moral principles clearly and consciously expressed or consistently
supported, but we cannot but feel that they are present in the shape
of instincts, and those instincts pervading and architectonic.
And if we allow so much of ethical enlightenment to these great
spokesmen of the Hellenic people, we cannot deny something of like
honour to the race among whom they were reared. Let us apportion our
debt of gratitude to our forerunners as it is justly due. There would
seem to be much of fallacy and of the injustice of a shallow judgment
in the contrast as popularly drawn between 'Hellenism' and 'Hebraism,'
according to which the former is spoken of as exclusively proclaiming
to the world the value of Beauty, the latter the value of
Righteousness. In this there is surely much injustice done to Hellas.
Because she taught the one, she did not therefore leave the other
untaught. It may have been for a short time, as her other greatness
was for a short time, though its effects are eternal, but for that
short time the national life, of Athens at any rate, is at least as
full of high moral feeling as that of any other people in the world.
Will not the names of Solon, of Aristeides, of Kallikratidas, of
Epameinondas, of Timoleon and many more, remind us that life could be
to the Hellene something of deeper moral import than a brilliant game,
or a garden of vivid and sweet sights and sounds where Beauty and
Knowledge entered, but Goodness was forgotten and shut out? For it
is not merely that these men, and very many more endowed with ample
portion of their spirit, were produced and reared among the race; they
were honoured and valued in a way that surely postulated the existence
of high ethical feeling in their countrymen. And even when the days
of unselfish statesmen and magnanimous cities were over, there were
philosophers whose schools were not the less filled because they
claimed a high place for righteousness in human life. To Solon and
Aristeides succeeded Socrates and Plato, to Epameinondas and Timoleon
succeeded Zeno and Epictetus. That the morality of the Hellenes was
complete on all sides, it would of course be irrational to maintain.
They had not, for instance, any more than the Hebrews, or any other
nation of antiquity, learnt to abhor slavery, though probably it
existed in a milder form at Athens than anywhere else in the old or
new world: they were more implacable in revenge and laxer in sexual
indulgence than the Christian ethics would allow in theory, though not
perhaps much more so than Christendom has shown itself in practice.
And though undoubtedly the greatest single impulse ever given to
morality came from Palestine, yet the ground which nurtured the seeds
of Christianity was as much Hellenic as Hebrew. It would be impossible
here to enter on an exhaustive comparison of the ethical capacities of
the two races, but before we pronounce hastily for the superiority of
the Hebrew there are surely some difficulties to surmount. We may
well ask, for example, Would Hellas ever have accepted as her chief
national hero such a man as David a man who in his life is conspicuous
by his crimes not less than by his brilliant gifts, and who dies with
the words of blood and perfidy on his lips, charging his son with the
last slaughterous satisfaction of his hate which he had sworn before
his God to forego? And though the great Hebrew prophets teach often
a far loftier morality than this, they cannot have been nearly so
representative of the feeling of this nation as were Aeschylus and
Sophocles and Pindar of the feeling of theirs. The Hebrews of the
prophets' age 'slew the prophets,' and left it to the slayers'
descendants to 'build their sepulchres,' and at the same time to
show their inherited character still more unmistakeably by once more
slaying the last prophet and the greatest.[3]
In truth in the literature, the art, the life generally of Hellas in
her prime, the moral interest whenever it appears, and that is not
seldom, claims for itself the grave and preponderant attention which
it must claim if it is to appear with fit dignity. But it is not
thrust forward unseasonably or in exaggeration, nor is it placed in a
false opposition to the interests of the aesthetic instincts, which
after all shade into the moral more imperceptibly than might be
generally allowed. There must be a moral side to all societies, and
the Hellenic society, the choicest that the world has seen, the
completest, that is, at once in sensibilities and in energies, could
not but show the excellence of its sensibilities in receiving moral
impressions, the excellence of its energies in achieving moral
conduct.
This, however, is no place to discuss at length questions in the
history of ethics. Yet it must be remembered that in the ancient world
departments of thought, and the affairs of men generally, were far
less specialized than in modern times. If the philosophy of Hellas be
the most explicit witness to her ethical development, her poetry
is the most eloquent. And scarcely at any time, scarcely even in
Aristotle, did Hellenic philosophy in any department lose most
significant traces of its poetical ancestry. But enough here if I have
succeeded in pointing out that in the great poet with whom we are
concerned there is an ethical as well as a poetical and historical
interest, supplying one more reason against neglect of his legacy of
song.