(b 522–518 bce; d 442–436 bce). Theban lyric poet. As a young man Pindar went to study in Athens, which had become an unequalled centre of musical and poetic influences from Ionia and the Peloponnesus. Tradition credits him with having had eminent teachers of choral lyric, chief among them Lasus of Hermione and Agathocles. Lasus developed the dithyramb into a mature art form and supposedly wrote the first prose treatise on music; Plato (Laches, 180d1) mentioned Agathocles as Damon's music teacher.
Although Pindar's compositions include all the various types of choral lyric, only the epinikion, or victory ode, is well represented by complete surviving examples. The four substantial books of Pindar's epinikia are among the great monuments of Greek lyric: each corresponds to one of the four festivals – the Olympia, Pythia, Isthmia and Nemea – and a number of the epinikia can be assigned to particular festivals and victors (for example, Pythian, xii, written in honour of Midas of Acragas, the prize-winning aulete at the 24th and 25th Pythian festivals in 490 and 486 bce). His works were for the most part religious; even the secular victory odes show a strength of religious feeling and exaltation that only Aeschylus could match. The literary handling goes far beyond the immediate occasion, usually that of a triumph in the national games. Myth receives special prominence, together with a gnomic element, and the victor is shown in the transfiguring moment of supreme achievement.
All but seven of the 45 extant odes have a triadic metrical scheme of stanza groups: strophe, matching antistrophe and dissimilar epode. Where multiple triadic groups appear, the epodes correspond in metric structure. Pindar's epinikia make use of three basic rhythmic patterns: the paeonic, the dactylo-epitritic and the logaoedic. One dactylo-epitritic epinikion is described by the poet as Dorian (Olympian, iii.5) and one logaoedic epinikion as Aeolian (Olympian, i.102), but there are also references to the Lydian aulos, harmonia and mode (tropos) in both rhythmic types (Olympian, v.19 and xiv.17; Nemean, iv.45 and viii.15). The references to Dorian and Aeolian would seen to pertain more to the overall style of the epinikia than to any specific tonos or harmonia.
The poet refers freely to musical details, displaying a wholly professional pride in his skill. He speaks most often of the kithara, usually calling it ‘phorminx’ rather than ‘lyra’ and describing it variously: it was Dorian, seven-stringed and had a deep, ringing tone. The double aulos is virtually always mentioned in any ode that also mentions the lyra, and often the two are in close conjunction; the sole exception (Olympian, v) has been thought suspect. This repeated and often explicit evidence for a concerted accompaniment of lyras and auloi serves as a safeguard against creating false antitheses between the two types of instrument. Attempts to parallel metre with mode and strophic responsion with melody have not succeeded. Pindar mentions in passing the Nomos, a stylized melodic pattern (Olympian, i.101; Pythian, xii.23), and the tropos, literally ‘turning’ (Olympian, xiv.17) – a term that at this period quite possibly described the contour of a melody, especially when taken in a given mode. The supposedly Pindaric melody of Pythian, i, printed by Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650), is spurious.
The fragments of Pindar's other works contain a number of noteworthy musical references. ‘The Dorian melody is [?the] most dignified’, he declares (Bowra, frag.56), seeming to anticipate the later development of doctrines of modal ethos; elsewhere (frag.288), as reported by Plutarch, he confesses his own inattention to the melodic tropos and continues by referring strangely to the unjust nature of destructive change in skills and capacities produced by certain kinds of modulations (metabolai). The first of these statements is not easily credited to Pindar; the second shows a direct concern with ethos and sounds remarkably like the later complaints of a Phrynichus or a Plato. He also credits Terpander with having discovered the Barbitos (frag.110a), and speaks cryptically of an Aeolian double aulos entering upon ‘a Dorian pathway of hymns’ (frag.180). Music had ultimate significance for Pindar, however, not as an aggregate of technical details but as the power to which he paid tribute in the opening strophes of Pythian, i: a cosmic force capable of instilling order and peace into the communal life of men.
J. Sandys, ed. and trans.: The Odes of Pindar, Including the Principal Fragments (London and Cambridge, MA, 1915, 3/1937/R)
C.M. Bowra, ed.: Pindari carmina cum fragmentis (Oxford, 1935, 2/1947/R)
B. Snell, ed.: Pindari carmina cum fragmentis, pts i–ii (Leipzig, 1953, rev. 5/1971–5 by H. Maehler)
C.M. Bowra, trans.: The Odes of Pindar (Harmondsworth, 1969)
A. Rome: ‘L'origine de la prétendue mélodie de Pindare’, Etudes classiques, i (1932), 3–11
H. Gundert: Pindar und sein Dichterberuf (Frankfurt, 1935/R)
A. Rome: ‘Pindare ou Kircher’, Etudes classiques, iv (1935), 337–50
R. Wagner: ‘Zum Wiederaufleben der antiken Musikschriftsteller seit dem 16. Jahrhundert, ein Beitrag zur Frage Kircher oder Pindar’, Philologus, xci (1936), 161–73
J. Irigoin: Histoire du texte de Pindare (Paris, 1952)
R.W.B. Burton: Pindar's Pythian Odes (Oxford, 1962)
C.M. Bowra: Pindar (Oxford, 1964)
L. Pearson: ‘The Dynamics of Pindar's Music: Ninth Nemean and Third Olympian’, Illinois Classical Studies, ii (1977), 54–69
A. Barker, ed.: Greek Musical Writings, i: The Musician and his Art (Cambridge, 1984), 54–61 [translated excerpts referring to musical subjects]
M. Heath: ‘Receiving the Kōmos: the Context and Performance of Epinician’, American Journal of Philology, cix (1988), 180–95
A. Burnett: ‘Performing Pindar's Odes’, Classical Philology, lxxxiv (1989), 283–93
C. Carey: ‘The Victory Ode in Performance: the Case for the Chorus’, Classical Philology, lxxxvi (1991), 192–200
M. Heath and M. Lefkowitz: ‘Epinician Performance’, Classical Philology, lxxxvi (1991), 173–91
K. Morgan: ‘Pindar the Professional and the Rhetoric of the Kōmos’, Classical Philology, lxxxviii (1993), 1–15
W.D. Anderson: Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 94–109
T.J. Mathiesen: Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE, 1999), 135–41
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN