PI1CDAR (Gr. Pindam8), the great lyric poet of Greece. was born about 522 B.C. of a noble family of Thebes, at Cynoseephalte, a village in that territory. His genius for music was hereditary, and at an early age he was sent by his father, himself a flute player, to receive instruction in the same art from Seopelinus. At this time his genius for poetry too—foreshadowed, according to later writers, by a swarm of bees miracu lously resting on his lips when asleep--began to develop itself, and so lie went to Athens to be placed under the tuition of Lasus oelfermione, the founder of the Athenian school of dithyrambic poetry: Before completing his 20th veer he returned to Thebes, where he continued to pursue his studies under Myrns and Oorinna, of Tanagra, two poetesses then famous in Bceotia. With both of his instructresses he contested the prize for music at Thebes, but was five times defeated by Corinna. lie was still a young man when he entered on his professional career as a poet, and his services soon came to be in great request on festive occasions throughout all the Hellenic states. He composed choral songs for Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse; Alexander, son of Amyntas, king of )face (Ionia; Theron, tyrant of Agrigentum •, Arcesileus, king of Cyrene; and also for many free states and private individuals. Ile won not only the admiration of his employers for his lyrical genius, but also their respect for his independent character, which, amid all the presents and rewards conferred upon him, never into that of the poet who merely performed for him. He was especially the favorite of Alexander, king of Macedonia, and of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse; and it is said that to the praises he lav ished on the former of these monarchs his house owed its preservation at the hands of Alexander the great, when he reduced the rest of Thebes to ruins. Ills life was for the most part spent abroad at the courts of kings, and at the scenes of the great public games; and at one period, 473 B.C., he resided at Syracuse at the court of Hiero for. the space of four years. Ile died most probably in 442 B.C., in his 80th year. Of the immense number of his poems, consisting of hymns to the gods, mans, dithyrambs, odes for processions (prosodia), maidens' songs (partheneiah mimic dancing songs (1typordtemata), convivial songs (sco/ia), dirges (threnoi), and encomia on princes, we only possess fragments. His ephillcia, or triumphal odes, however, have come down to
us entire; and it is from these—divided into four books, and celebrating the victories won in the Olympian, Fythian, Nernean, and Isthmian games respectively—that we must form an opinion of Pindar as a poet. A victory at these games conferred honor not upon the winner and his family only, but also on the city to which he belonged ; and for its celebration—which began with a procession to the temple, where sacrifice was offered, and ended with a convivial banquet—a poem was specially comprised, and was sung by a chorus either during the procession, or, more frequently, at the banquet (comes). Pindar's poetical style is peculiar. Full of bold conceptions and striking met aphors, his manner is so rapid and so subject to abrupt transitions, as to render him not only a difficult but an obscure composer. Typical examples of his strength, as well as of his weakness, will be found in the second Olympian and first Pythian odes, where tire description of the Islands of the blest in the former, and of an eruption of mount /Etna in the latter, are brilliant offsets to the shadowy mythological allusion and the undevel oped metaphor which also characterize them. His meters, in spite of tire able efforts of BOckb, still remain to be satisfactorily elucidated; and all that we can here say of them is, that he makes chief use of the Dorian rhythm, and not unfrequently of the .21,'olian and Lydian. He has been fortunate neither in his numerous imitators nor translators— Gray Icing, perhaps, the most successful among the former, and Carey, Abraham Moore, Morice, and Baring among the latter. He has been elaborately explained and criticised in Schmidt's Phalar's Lcben uaxl Dieldiing (1852); while his relation to lyric poetry in general forms the subject of Yillemain's brilliant Essais sztr le Genie de Pin dare et sin' la Poesie lypique (1859). The best editions are those of Mali; of Dissen, re-edited by Sehneidewin; and of Hartung.