The First Poets Read online

  If language and the antecedent contents of language (poetry, liturgy, legend) are a separate and sufficient realm, things will happen in the language which are themselves aesthetically sufficient. In Olympian VII, a poem is like wine in a golden bowl with which a father toasts a new son-in-law (1–10). Pindar delivers Nemean III late. He hardly apologises. He declares to the chorus that waits eagerly on Aegina for the Muse to deliver her song that he is like the eagle. He builds the fact of his tardiness into the poem itself, it becomes a chief part of its occasion. Olympian VI, to Hagesias of Syracuse, victor in the mule race in 472 or 468, opens with the compelling image of the poem as a palace, the beginning like a pillared porch. Language as space, language as a structurable material which can be stilled, drawn out of time. His is metaphoric language, but Pindar actually presents his craft as analogous with the material crafts of other artists.

  His hyporchemata—poems at the same time sung and danced by the chorus, Athenaeus says—are lively and inventive. Some were encomia, others narrative, or they gave political advice, or praised the gods. Stobaeus quotes an epigrammatic couplet from one of them:

  War seems sweet until one tastes it.

  Known, it takes the heart and wastes it.71

  While in Sicily, he wrote a hyporchema and indulged in characteristic wordplay, invoking his host:

  Take to heart what I am saying

  To you, holy temples is your name,

  Father, Aetna’s founder.72

  The word for “temple” is ieron. It is more than a pun, for a city’s founder is a founder of temples. It is said that he sent this poem gratis, as a little extra to accompany Pythian II. If his subject in an encomium is called Alexander he binds him by name to the Alexandros of Homer, Paris, the great warrior and lover. His language is at all times literary, as are his poetic strategies. The two general “classes” of ode are based on his metrical choices: Doric and Aeolian. He learned his craft in Athens but its origins are Dorian and seventh century or earlier: “the Aeolian was travelling the Dorian road of hymns.”73

  In Olympian I (476), praising Hieron of Syracuse, he revises the story of Pelops, who was, William H. Race reminds us, the first athlete to compete at Elis. David Mulroy regards the poem as proof that Pindar is an ironist, even a rather comic poet: he cannot stomach the solemnity of most critical readings. Pindar deliberately changed the myth of Pelops (“muddy face”) to let the gods off the hook. There are numerous culinary metaphors embedded in the diction. The neighbours said that Pelops had been stewed and served up to the gods by Tantalus (“lurching” or “most wretched”). In fact Poseidon had carried him off and taken him to Olympus. (The only thoroughly heterosexual god in the pantheon seems to have been Death, the victims of whose crushes were always girls. Zeus had Ganymede—“rejoicing in virility” or “bright penis”—and Poseidon had Pelops …) In relation to the games, the key part of the story is Poseidon’s gift of horses to his erstwhile beloved so that Pelops could win the hand of burly Hippodamia (“horse tamer”), daughter of King Oenomaus (“impetuous with wine”) of Pisa. “Pindar’s purpose is entertainment, not pious edification,” Mulroy insists.74

  Although Pindar chides his irreligion, Homer remains his guiding star, different though his own techniques are from those of epic. In Nemean VII he declares,

  Odysseus’ tale, I feel,

  Exceeds the hero’s actual sufferings

  Because Homer’s sweet telling made it greater.

  Language can take experience to a higher register, more memorable, more seeming-real. It is Homer who made Ajax “honoured among mankind” by means of his verse.75 Pindar prays for a similar power with words. The ancient hero is made present in the modern champion, the modern champion is made timeless in his association with the hero. The poem transfigures the living victor.76 In Pythian IV he quotes Homer as supreme authority. But his approach is in no way like Homer’s. Pindar’s is lofty and elaborate stuff: complex word order, hyper-allusive to mythology, inventive within the realm of myth. Homer’s story belongs in the past; Pindar tries to bring the ancient story alive in the present but also deliberately to distance himself from his great forebear. In Paean VII77 he declares that he is “not following the well-trodden road of Homer / But using the horses of another …”

  I make my prayer to Uranus’ daughter, Memory,

  And her daughter Muses, Heliconians

  To grant me skill with words

  For blind are men’s imaginations if they

  Without the Muses’ aid set out to seek

  The path that leads deep into wisdom.

  Mikhail Bakhtin outlines the broad similarities between epic and ode. They both “tell” a story, though their methods of telling are radically different; they concentrate on heroes and exceptional deeds. In the epic we expect catalogues, epithets, full-scale characters, narrative; Thebes and Troy loom large. If they can do so in the epiniceans as well, they are differently deployed.

  While the epic, remote in time, considers heroes of the past, the ode elevates those of the present and ties them in to the past. Epic is a flowing language of narration; ode a texture of cross-referencing. Like a photograph, without the deliberate continuum of epic, the epinicean ode singles out a moment of triumph. We are closer to the occasions, the athletic victories celebrated in odes, than we are to the narrative of epic, and yet Homer’s poems come closer to us than Pindar’s, in part at least because they occupy their time rather than propose strategies for eluding it. They tell continuous stories rather than photographing, as it were, moments of intense achievement. Pindar draws on epic as a resource, but he does not contribute to it. He celebrates victories but he does not describe them, or linger over the victors’ lives or antecedents.

  Nor does he contribute to tragedy, the form that was emerging from the new Athens even as the social order which sustained the epinicean tradition crumbled. Tragedy was different not only in format but also in subject. Where Pindar’s poems, though specific to a victory and a city, were intended to be performed throughout the Greek world, tragedy was more locally contained. It did a tyrant from Magna Graecia no good to be celebrated only within his own realm: the epiniceans had to be performed on the mainland, the name and triumph of Syracuse or Aetna or Cyrene had to be universally acknowledged. An athlete of Rhodes, a tyrant of Sicily invested in wide publicity. Pindar’s performances had to appeal to the audience that patronised the pan-Hellenic festivals and to play to other audiences as well. Tragedy, by contrast, was performed at Athens, and the citizens of Athens met each year to pass judgement on tragedies they had seen. A playwright needed to succeed at first with his local audience only: they were his patrons. It is ironic that tragedy, in origin almost a parochial Greek form, eventually gripped the imagination of the Greek and then the European world, while the lyric poetry of Pindar, aimed at a cosmopolitan audience, declined in importance with social change and was eclipsed after the poet’s death. What is local is seldom deliberately local, and hence, although rooted in a place, it sometimes travels vigorously. An art which sets out to be “universal” and cosmopolitan in the end unanchors itself from its immediate occasions and contingencies to float, as it were, above them, out of their human range. Such art can possess the intense opacity of oracular statement: it needs to be unpacked, interpreted, translated back into the light of day. Sometimes it gets quite lost in translation.

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus speaks of the “austere style”: “frequent harsh and dissonant collocations,” a poetry decidedly more consonantal than vocalic.78 He uses the image of a building in which the stones are not properly squared and polished. The word “austere” for him means using big and difficult words; in some ways the verse deliberately lacks harmony, imitates nature rather than art, “reflects emotion rather than character.” Pindar uses few connectives “and no articles.” Just as poets speak ill of the sound qualities of Ben Jonson’s poetry, so they criticise Pindar’s.

  He is sparing in his use of alliteration and other ob
vious poetic techniques. He does pun and play on homonyms, and there are numerous intentional verbal echoes that function almost like leitmotifs. C. A. M. Fennell finds in Olympian I over 60 words that recur once or more in 117 lines.79 The exigencies of strict metre place a great strain on syntax, which makes the construction of the poems often very hard even for the expert reader. Hyperbatons, those awkward “stepping stones” or “oversteppings” which involve disruption of word order, abound. Two words which belong together are sometimes estranged by a run of more than twelve words. Such sentences must be carefully dismantled, understood, then fitted back together. At times there is the same heavy inertia that one experiences in the weaker Homeric Hymns, and this is due to the weak verbs and the fact that each noun walks on the crutches of at least one and often two adjectives. The passive voice, the genitive construction, and continual periphrasis are among the vices of such a style. Literal translation does brutal justice to it:

  Like a seer, I do not fail to notice the clear signs,

  when, as the chamber of the purple-robed Horai80 is opened,

  the nectar-bearing flowers bring in the sweet-smelling spring.

  Then, then, upon the immortal earth are

  cast the lovely tresses of violets, and roses are fitted to hair

  and voices of songs echo to the accompaniment of pipes

  and choruses come to Semele of the circling headband.81

  The rules of syntax generally hold, but they are stretched to the limit. We encounter every rhetorical trope. Among them there are enallage (hypallage), where the poet transfers an adjective or epithet that logically belongs to one noun syntactically to another (e.g., “the fearless seed of Heracles”); zeugma, where he uses one verb with different meanings for two subjects; hendiadys, where two nouns mean one thing (e.g., crowns and horses means victorious horses); brachyology and ellipsis, the suppression of relational words. He also regularly uses the rhetorical strategy known as the priamel, a series of superlative metaphors crowned by a “most superlative.” Olympian I sets the tone in its opening lines:

  Best element is water; but gold gleaming like flame

  Through night outshines all noble wealth;

  But if, my heart, you wish

  To celebrate athletic games

  Don’t look beyond the sun for brighter

  Star or one in daytime warmer,

  Glowing in deserted air; nor let us name

  Games worthier than Olympia’s to celebrate.

  Not unrelated to the priamel, which usually develops in threes, is the process of “ring composition,” a sequencing of events, sometimes, as in Olympian VII (460 BC), in a reverse chronology. We find the same structure in Pythian IX and Pythian XI, the mini-Oresteia. Pindar is also an inveterate hyper-boliser: “my voice is even more sweet than honeycombs the bees made.”82 A conceit, in both senses of the word, is that his poems will make Thebes more famous not only among men but also among the gods.83 He did not heed his own moral counsel against hubris.

  Dionysus of Halicarnassus tends to be a maker of restrictive rules by which he then criticises a poet. The sigma, he declares, with its hissing sound, disgusted the ear, and poets including Lasus used it sparingly, sometimes composing a poem almost without it, a deliberate omission which, while it promoted euphony, diminished the resources of significance. In the second dithyramb Pindar protests against the unnaturalness of such omissions.84 He deploys every possible device and technique, but the one set of rules he follows doggedly is that of prosodic correctness. He is a conservative in his art: any art which hoards meanings in strict forms, essentialises, and aspires to raise its subjects to a timeless sphere is conservative in the literal sense. The eunomia, or harmony, of good laws that he celebrates also entails a harmony of artistic resources. The Muses speak through the poet; if they speak well, people and events enter memory. The poet is at once a spiritual and secular means by which deeds and the names of the men who performed them survive in the teeth of time; he is a minister of sorts. In Nemean VII, dedicated to the boy Sogenes of Aegina, Pindar describes the process:

  … Sogenes, son of Thearion, is exalted in this song

  Because among pentathletes he excelled.

  He lives in the Aiakides’ singing, spear-clashing city

  And they keenly value such an achieving spirit

  Tempered in contest as he is.

  If a man has the skill to win, he casts a honey-sweet

  Occasion into the Muses’ currents; high achievements

  Lacking their song and dance vanish into the dark.

  Only one looking glass do we have for great deeds:

  Bright-crowned Mnemosyne whose flowing grace

  Is given, the wages for all his labour

  Who labours for fame.

  This ode has long been regarded as a problem and a key: “the touchstone of Pindaric interpretation.”85 How does the narrative connect with the occasion? Why was such a complex, beautiful and finally insoluble poem, asks the editor William H. Race, written for a boy athlete? Pindar may have taken particular pains because of his love for Aegina. A rich man who is also wise, says Pindar, will not hoard his wealth. Is the sense not clear? An athlete who is rich in strength and skill should achieve; a man who is materially rich should achieve. The rich man pays the poet to sing in his honour and, like the athlete, he lives for ever. No one enjoys perfect happiness, the poet concedes because, as Pound said, Time is the evil.

  As an epinicean poet Pindar was most active in the 470s and 460s BC, and it was in Arkesilas IV, king of Cyrene, that he invested his best efforts. For him he composed Pythian IV, “almost epic in scale,” as Bowra says, the longest of the odes. Pythian V was dedicated to Arkesilas as well, and both poems relate to his victory in the chariot race in 462 BC. The first was intended for performance at Delphi, or later, at the palace in Cyrene; the second was for public performance in Cyrene at “the feast of the Dorian Apollo Carneius.”86

  Pythian V is a relatively conventional and direct encomium of Arkesilas. It also celebrates his charioteer, Karrhotos, more comprehensively than other charioteers in the odes. Praise is seldom for the driver, usually for the owner, except on odd occasions when (as in Pythian II, for Hieron, and Isth mian I, for Herodotus of Thebes) the owner is the contestant. Karrhotos may have been Arkesilas’ brother-in-law.

  In Pythian IV the victory of Arkesilas’ chariot is taken for granted. The poem concentrates on the foundation of the city by Battus, which leads into the story of Jason and the Argonauts and ends with political advice. Arkesilas’ family claimed an Argonaut among its ancestors. Cyrene is a “doctor” city, a place full of healing. Its chief export was a plant extract known as silphium used in medicines. In his poem Pindar seems to be urging the claims of an exiled Cyrenian, Damophilos, who perhaps paid for the poem to be composed, a tribute and a plea.

  The more conventional poem was for the wider audience; the longer, more complex poem, with its intriguing obliquities, its political nuances, was presented more directly, a mixture of flattery, entertainment and persuasion. Pindar did not write for Arkesilas again. The tyrant was murdered by his people shortly after Pythian IV was performed. The strict, efficient but unsustainable structures of Theron’s and Hieron’s tyrannies collapsed when they died. A similar collapse occurred in Cyrene. Pindar belonged to a fading courtly order: it strikes some scholars as odd that he should have felt at home with tyrants, but he did. They seemed to provide not only patronage and occasions but stability, a stability which only lasted for one man’s lifetime or, at most, two.

  Pythian I, from 470 BC, is the last ode dedicated to Hieron, described as “Hieron of Aetna” here rather than “Hieron of Syracuse” because he founded the new city in 476–75 BC with five thousand settlers from Syracuse and five thousand from the Peloponnese. He wanted its foundation, quite as much as his victory, celebrated. Hieron’s team won the chariot race. The ode celebrates the comprehensive eunomia that the victory and the founding of Aetna represent. It opens with a
hymn to the lyre, powerful enough to overcome divine wrath and, as Orpheus showed, to calm extremes. It can also scare Zeus’ foes. The poem is decidedly civic in its themes and the counsel it gives Hieron (and his son). Pindar begins with particulars, which he then builds out from. The story is of Typhos, squashed down under Mount Aetna. After Hieron died, in 466, his son was unequal to the succession.

  At the Olympic Games of 476, with the Greek victories at Salamis (480), Plataia (479) and—in Magna Graecia—Himera recently achieved, Pindar (who remained pan-Hellenic despite his Theban birth) scored the largest number of commissions.87 The Greeks had proved that they could defend themselves and fight together. Five of the fourteen Olympian odes are for victors at that Olympiad.88 After that, Pindar kept writing epinicean poems, the last which we can date being from 446 BC. This ode can stand as the last great poem of the “great age of Greek lyric poetry.”