This circumstance may seem to narrow the scope of the songs, but protocol demanded attention to the gods and heroes of the victor's city or family, or to some god or hero who could in some way be appropriately invoked as a comparison. The public, celebratory, and partly secular nature of this part of his 'collected works' may have helped their survival during the Middle Ages, when Byzantine scholars seem to have neglected both public, but too obviously pagan, and more private - and usually erotic - genres. Despite the origin of the genre, it only partly and occasionally resembles modern public relations for super-star athletes. Even the athletes normally belonged to aristocratic families, which could provide them with the time and coaching to train effectively. The 'Odes' are songs composed for celebrations in honor of victors in the major Games of ancient Greece (Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian), and are centered on athletes and wealthy patrons (owners of horses and chariot teams). This is the largest body of material from any of the poets of the late Archaic and early Classical periods to survive to modern times, but is not necessarily representative of Pindar's total body of work. Four 'books' of his collected poems exist, intact (for all practical purposes), or at least pretty much as the Alexandrian scholars who assembled a larger edition had left them. However, most of the works of this 'Lyric Age' are lost, except for fragments, and we might have been left to wonder about all the fuss over this Pindar, if we had the typical set of quotations and papyrus scraps.įortunately, Pindar is to a large extent a great exception.

This ranking, combined with the period in which he lived, makes Pindar a figure of Shakespearean proportions. Meanwhile, over in Athens, young Aeschylus was a rising star with the new-fangled 'tragedy.' Simonides is now most often mentioned for something he probably didn't compose, the Thermopylae epitaph, 'Go! Tell the Spartans.' These rivals were Simonides, who lived long enough to celebrate the old aristocracy, the 'tyrants' who often replaced it, and then the new 'democracy,' and his nephew, Bacchylides, who was Pindar's younger contemporary. Of the other eight lyric greats, most, like Sappho, were renowned predecessors in previous generations, but two were working at the same time, and competed with him for patrons. His time was the period of the Persian Wars.

Pindar (about 518-438 BC) was regarded as THE outstanding poet of his time by the later Greeks, and their Roman admirers, and one of the latest of the nine greatest lyric poets.

Pindar the complete odes