Pindar

"Goethe and Holderlin in Germany were obsessed by the power of Pindar—Goethe ranked him second only to Homer—and composed lyrics which echo much of the Pindaric spirit. In England Gray was the first to respond to the call. His Pindaric odes, with their urgency and passion, foreshadow bolder flights that were to come. Shelley's Ode to Naples is divided into ten irregular stanzas marked epode, strophe and antistrophe and characterized by the lively transitions and unrestrained imagery of Pindar. The Ode to the West Wind and Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality stand in the same tradition. The suitability and appeal of Pindar penetrated to the schools and Universities."

"His innate, unquestioning pride in his poetical mission means that he gives to it all his gifts and all his efforts. The result is a poetry that by any standards deserves the name because it is based on a radiant vision of reality and fashioned with so subtle, so adventurous, and so dedicated an art that it is worthy to be an earthly counterpart of the songs which Apollo and the Muses sing on Olympus, and which Pindar regards as the archetype of music on those lofty occasions when all discords are resolved and all misgivings obliterated by the power of the life-giving word."

"The association between the agon and the aristocratic made it possible for individual families to cherish a tradition of competing and winning. Such families of champions were Pindar's best customers, and it is from him that we learn of them; he is our indispensable informant on the competitive spirit."

"Of Greek poets only one, Pindar, expressed the full range of ideals which achieved so much prominence in the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century. The themes of military victory, national glory, personal triumph and emancipation linked with the freedom of the community were enforced in Pindar with a 'vehement intensity' which spoke to the new aesthetic; and in England the first poet to respond to these widening opportunities was Gray."

"Pindar is austere. Splendor can be cold, and Pindar glitters but never warms. He is hard, severe, passionless, remote, with a kind of haughty magnificence. He never steps down from his frigid eminence. Aristocrats did not stoop to lies, and his pen would never deviate from the strict truth in praising any triumph. He would glorify a victor so far as he was really glorious, but no further. As he himself puts it, he would not tell "a tale decked out with dazzling lies against the worth of truth." Only what was in actual fact nobly praiseworthy would be praised by him."

"He began his poetical career at the age of twenty, with an ode on a Thessalian youth's victory in the games. He grew to be the national lyrist of Greece. It is a sign of the coming time that he also pays his homage to Athens,—"the bulwark of Hellas," the city that "laid the foundation of freedom.""

"Pindar usually takes some heroic legend or group of legends connected with the victor or the victor's city, and makes this his main theme... In treating the legends, Pindar aims especially at bringing out their moral, and applying this to the victor or his city. If we wish to understand Pindar's place among his contemporaries, we must never forget how closely these legends which he interpreted were bound up with Greek religion, and with the belief of Greek cities and great Greek families about their own origin."

"The loss of the music by which Pindar's Odes were accompanied deprives us of an indispensable aid to the comprehension of their effect as works of art. And, if the music were extant, modern imagination would still have to supply the scenic accessories of a gorgeous festival, the light, the colour, the movement, the glowing sympathy of a brilliant audience with the newly won or freshly remembered victory which shed a reflected lustre on the victor's native city, the thrill of patriotic pride responding to each allusion, faint or dark, perhaps, for us, that touched some household word of inherited renown, the sense of deepened spiritual life with which Greeks for whom the faith of their fathers was still a vital force heard the secret lessons of divine lore drawn forth by that great poet of all Greece in whom the priests of the Delphian Apollo revered the full inspiration of their god. Pindar's achievement cannot be measured by a literary criticism of his text. The glory of his song has passed for ever from the world with the sound of the rolling harmonies on which it once was borne, with the splendour of rushing chariots and athletic forms around which it threw its radiance, with the white-pillared cities by the Aegean or Sicilian sea in which it wrought its spell, with the beliefs or joys which it ennobled; but those who love his poetry, and who strive to enter into its high places, can still know that they breathe a pure and bracing air, and can still feel vibrating through a clear calm sky the strong pulse of the eagle's wings as he soars with steady eyes against the sun."

"Pindar was a lyric poet of vehement intensity. His principal surviving works are epinikia, choral odes to be sung in honour of victories at the athletic festivals. In them he expressed attitudes which, however conventional or unoriginal at the time, had much in common with the new outlook of the Romantics. His themes are glory, beauty, nobility, freedom: the glory of athletic prowess, family achievement, the beauty of physical perfection, the nobility of breeding or heroism, the great gestures, such as Hiero's victory over the Etruscans or the Athenian victories in the Persian Wars, which secured national freedom."

"οὔ τοι ἅπασα κερδίων φαίνοισα πρόσωπον ἀλάθει᾽ ἀτρεκής· καὶ τὸ σιγᾶν πολλάκις ἐστὶ σοφώτατον ἀνθρώπῳ νοῆσαι."

"ῥῆμα δ᾽ ἑργμάτων χρονιώτερον βιοτεύει"

"ἐπάμεροι: τί δέ τις; τί δ᾽ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ, λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπεστιν ἀνδρῶν καὶ μείλιχος αἰών"

"γλυκύ δ᾽ἀπείρῳ πόλεμος. πεπειραμένων δέ τις ταρβεῖ προσιόντα νιν καρδία περισσῶς."

"γένοι' οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών"

"μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον σπεῦδε, τὰν δ᾿ ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν."

"A good deed hidden in silence dies."

"Time is the best preserver of righteous men."

"Law, the king of all mortals and immortals."

"Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, ὁ δὲ χρυσὸς αἰθόμενον πῦρ ἅτε διαπρέπει νυκτὶ μεγάνορος ἔξοχα πλούτου."

"ἁμέραι δ᾽ ἐπίλοιποι μάρτυρες σοφώτατοι."

"εἰ δὲ θεὸν ἀνήρ τις ἔλπεταί τι λαθέμεν ἔρδων, ἁμαρτάνει."

"σοφὸς ὁ πολλὰ εἰδὼς φυᾷ."

"Süß ist der Krieg nur dem Unerfahrenen, der Erfahrene aber fürchtet im Herzen sein Nahen."

"Werde welcher du bist erfahren."

"Liebe Seele, trachte nicht nach dem ewigen Leben, sondern schöpfe das Mögliche aus."

"Länger als Taten lebt das Wort."

"Eines Schattens Traum sind Menschen."

"Der Brauch ist der Herrscher in allem."

"Denn unsterblich in Tönen lebt fort, was ein Mund kunstvoll erzählt hat."

"Das Beste zwar ist Wasser ..."