[In the essay below, Baker discusses the figurative language, meters, rhetoric, and myths that comprise the style of Pindar's odes."]

There was once a time when Pindar was regarded by moderns as a queer jumble of contests, of gnomic sayings, of myths, and of almost arrogant self-esteem. The blending of all these elements—if not the very reason for presenting them in poetry at all—was not easily to be explained; and men long held, therefore, that Pindar was not only difficult but also of questionable value. The discovery of the works of Bacchylides, in 1896, however, helped greatly to change this feeling. Bacchylides is far easier to follow than is Pindar, and very much more translucent; therefore he furnished a simpler model whereby to study Pindar's department, namely that of Choral-Lyric—the lyric written for the song and the dance. A comparison of the two poets has thrown much light on what was not so clear before, and has proved what was previously suspected—that many of the striking peculiarities of Pindar are manifestations of the tradition and precedent of his department.

But the removal of the departmental difficulties could not sufficiently lighten the task of reading Pindar to make him more generally studied. The individualistic and personal difficulties remained behind; so that we may call Pindar one of the infrequently read classical authors, and one who beyond a limited circle of Greek students is to-day practically unknown.

Pindar's fame in Greece was unquestionably greater, and his circle of readers larger than it is in the modern world, although we can hardly ascribe to him all the popularity which Plutarch, whose frequent quotation from Pindar, a fellow-citizen of Bœotia, would lead us to think he had. The very nature of his choicest compositions, the Epinicia, or Songs of Victory, which were written to celebrate the rewards of success in contests at the great national festivals at Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea, was such as to preclude the possibility of very wide circulation. Admirable works of art though they are, the epinicia were not entirely floods of poetic inspiration which burst the gates of the poet's restraint and demanded expression merely for expression's sake. Inspired they were; but unfortunately the inspiration was often the yellow light of gleaming gold, or the exultant hope of favor and patronage. Each epinicion was written to celebrate a given man's success. It was of particular interest, therefore, to him and his immediate circle alone; and if we add to this fact that in each instance the man celebrated was a member of the Greek aristocracy, we can see an even greater limitation placed upon the number of Pindar's hearers or readers. Much has been written about the poet's art of making a national event out of a given patron's victory; but the personal theme of his poetry certainly made for narrowness of appeal, even though we must admit that Pindar's treatment of a specific victory proceeds on broad and general lines calculated not to end in the immediate family of the victor.

The ancients have agreed with the moderns as to the problem which Pindar presented to the reader. To the writers on Greek rhetoric who flourished in the post-classical period, when men were too busy learning the intricacies of classical Attic to write anything original, he stood largely as a representative of the rugged style of composition—merely a specimen to be collected and put into the same preserving-jar with Thucydides, his counterpart in prose. Some modern critic dubbed Pindar "the scholar's poet"; and the evil effects of this name he has never been able to live down. Few people now read him, and fewer still are intimately familiar with him, largely, perhaps, because of the fact that he has come to be surrounded in the minds of most modern students with an aura of exoticism which they fancy requires for its penetration too much of the primitive element that Hesiod prescribed for the ascent to Arete—namely, hard work.

That Pindar is difficult to read is not to be denied; for the student who has been reading the carefully constructed, smooth, easily-flowing sentences of Lysias, for example, would find a decidedly painful contrast in Pindar. These two are—in addition to the fact that one is a prose writer, the other a poet—quite widely removed in their positions in Greek style. Lysias is perhaps the world's finest master of the art that conceals art; and in his works will be found passages that read along as smoothly and easily as the imperceptible current of a mighty river—passages that for all their apparent guilelessness are the despair of imitators. Lysias is a strikingly excellent illustration of clear, transparent writing; whereas Pindar typifies the style which the ancients themselves regarded as harsh—the αυστηρός αρμoνία, or the severe style.

The troublesome characteristics of Pindar could perhaps be best described by giving an account of the ᾀυστηρό αρμoνία. This is a style in which the virile, concept-bearing noun predominates at the expense of the lighter, more unifying verb. Juxtaposition of ideas is far more frequent than a predication facilitated by means of the copula; and a rugged massing of substantives almost beats into our minds the thought that seems to lie under, through, and over them all, yet not in any single one of these substantives.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a writer of the time of Augustus, and perhaps the greatest student of literary style in all ages, has made an unsurpassable analysis of this severe manner of composition. In elucidation I quote him as follows:—

It [the austere style] requires that the words should be like columns firmly planted and placed in strong positions, so that each word should be seen on every side, and that the parts should be at appreciable distances from one another, being separated by perceptible intervals. It does not in the least shrink from using frequently harsh sound-clashings which jar on the ear; like blocks of building-stone that are laid together unworked, blocks that are not square and smooth, but preserve their natural roughness and irregularity. It is prone for the most part to expansion by means of great spacious words. It objects to being confined to short syllables, except under occasional stress of necessity.

In respect of the words, then, these are the aims which it strives to attain, and to these it adheres. In its clauses it pursues not only these objects, but also impressive and stately rhythms, and tries to make its clauses not parallel in structure or sound, nor slaves to a rigid sequence, but noble, brilliant, free. It wishes them to suggest nature rather than art, and to stir emotion rather than to reflect character. And as to periods, it does not, as a rule, even attempt to compose them in such a way that the sense of each is complete in itself: if it ever drifts into this accidentally, it seeks to emphasize its own unstudied and simple character, neither using any supplementary words which in no way aid the sense, merely in order that the period may be fully rounded off, nor being anxious that the period should move smoothly or showily, nor nicely calculating them so as to be just sufficient (if you please) for the speaker's breath, nor taking pains about any other such trifles. Further, the arrangement in question is marked by flexibility in its use of the cases, variety in the employment of figures, few connections; it lacks articles; it often disregards natural sequence; it is anything rather than florid, it is aristocratic, plainspoken, unvarnished; an old-world mellowness constitutes its beauty.

Other critics, men who have been farther removed in time from Pindar than was Dionysius, and who, accustomed from childhood to other tongues, knew far less Greek than didhe, have substituted the term archaism for his old-world mellowness; but the substitution has brought a loss rather than a gain. To call Pindar archaic is to admit an ignorance of the conventions of his department, or to overlook the fact that he post-dates Homer, who is always modern, and that he is the contempory of Aischylos, who stands at the bud and flower of Greece's prime. The term archaic, in plastic art, has come to be applied to works characterized by adherence to the law of frontality and by the 'type' manner of production prevalent before the work of Myron. It is doubtful whether Pindar fits in this category; for, although his extant poems are types of epinicia, they are not the whole of his productions. Besides, their language and metres are greatly diversified; and this term which fills a prominent place in material art, has but doubtful significance when applied to literature.

The language of Pindar is somewhat responsible for the "old-world mellowness" that is to be found in his works. It is not Theban, as a recent author seems to imagine, who asserts that Bœotia developed stiffness and bombast, whereas Athens produced grace and ease. It is not bombastic language, nor yet is it characterized by Athenian fluency. It is, rather, a language remotely comparable to that of Spenser, a literary vehicle, and no spoken speech at all. Aischylos has said that his dreams were the τεμάχη, or scraps, from the feast of Homer; and Pindar, as well as all the other poets—and not a few prose writers of Greece—partook heavily of the fare of their blind host. Pindar's language is a mixture of the Epic, Æolic, and Doric dialects, each of these elements varied according to the mood of the particular poem. Perhaps the Doric seems more in evidence than the other dialects; but this predominance can be naturally explained as caused by the handling of Stesichorus, the Doric pioneer in choral-lyric.

To the variations according to mood must be added the variations according to the personality of the poet. It is to be remembered that Pindar was a member of the aristocracy, who would, on the one hand, feel the right to assume a lofty and terse diction, and, on the other, would feel himself not bound to avoid giving offence. He is conscious of the security of his position, and for that reason does not recoil from expressing the commonplace, even the unseemly.

Another matter which has contributed to the difficulty of reading Pindar is the intricacy of the metres which he uses. The division of his works into their metres and cola has come down to us in a long tradition based upon metrical scholia which show the influence of Hephæstion and Aristoxenus. This tradition was discarded by the scholar Boeckh (1811-21), who in turn was followed by Schmidt, with his neat systématisation of the poems. Schmidt is perhaps best known to students to-day through John Williams White's translation of his Rhythmic and Metric, in 1878. Probably the latest scansion of Pindar which has sought authenticity by publication is that of Schroeder, 1908. That none of these treatments has been universally accepted in toto is attested by the fact that Professor Wilamowitz has what he considers some improvements upon them in his latest work on Greek metrics. We may say that the odes of Pindar are composed in dactylo-epitrite, logacedic, and paionian rhythms; but unfortunately the former two of these terms are now involved in dispute, so that our information is not as enlightening as it seems. Whatever may be the technical term applied to his rhythms, however, a sympathetic reading of the poems, with due regard for long and short syllables, will make one feel their movement; and it will do more than this—it will bring out the mood of each poem.

Possibly Pindar's metres, possibly the dictates of his department, and possibly his personality alone will account for the characteristics of his poems. Of any one of these we know less than we might wish; but we can draw our inferences from his works. We have said that his personality was aristocratic. The conventions of his department have been surveyed by Dornseiff, who seems to think that the purpose of choral-lyric was largely to convey the effect of turgidity and bombast. This, however, can hardly be considered a sympathetic view. We should be fairer to Pindar if we adhered more closely to the information given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. In Pindar we find a large rhetorical element; but this element is in keeping with the ᾲὐστηρoòς άρμονίᾳ̑. It is not the art which smooths away all difficulties from the path of the reader; but it is the art in which the author solicits the help of the reader and makes him a co-worker in the elaboration of his ideas.

The diction of Pindar is lofty and elevated, with much fullness. As would be expected, circumlocution occurs very frequently. There is seen in it an influence of the speech of the Delphic priests, who, more because they were guided by traditional and religious impulses than because they sought to insure a means of escape, if their prophecies failed, refrained from calling a spade a spade, but resorted to giving descriptions of the objects meant in their divinations.

As in sentence structure Pindar shows a fondness for coördination, so in his arrangement of words, coördination prevails. The chief indication of its presence here is a large use of apposition, which often comes to equal the use of a comparison without ώς, or some sign of the simile.

Similes and perhaps all the figures known to rhetoricians are present in the odes of Pindar; and his diction may be called highly figurative and imaginative. Manifold are the objects which serve as the basis for these figures; but the very first strophe of the "First Olympian Ode" will present the best epitome of Pindar's favorite objects of comparison. Here we find water, gold, gleaming fire, lordly wealth, the sun that shines by day, the stars that gleam at night, the broad expanse of the sky or the ether. Pindar's love for figures which portray flashing brilliance and masterly swiftness has been the subject of much consideration, the outcome of which has been to attribute this predilection to his aristocratic inheritance. The aristocrat must be rich and strong; and brilliant display and swiftness are manifestations of wealth and strength.

The Odes of Pindar are so strongly ornamented with figures that their author has often been charged with mixing his metaphors. Dornseiff seems to find in him figures that coil and uncoil about one another, and are extremely difficult to follow:—

Pindar is continually mingling picture and reality, or is continually hovering back and forth between the concept and the portrayal, between the object itself and a pretty veil for the object. The archaic tendency to strong metaphorical speech is so intensified in Pindar that his figures cross each other so frequently as to make it difficult to see the end of his flourishes.

To me, the term archaic used here is odious; and I feel that we should do better to maintain toward this apparent shortcoming of the poet the attitude stated by Professor Gildersleeve. Pindar slides from view to view with great rapidity; and his quick succession of figures is but another objective indication of his love of swiftness. Perhaps, too, his readers have read into him a fault by taking his asyndeton as the result of omission rather than of commission.

In considering Pindar's work, we must not pass over the general form of the epinicion itself. Each of these songs of victory was merely another variation of the same theme, in which the conventions of the department seemed to dictate that there should be four elements—namely, the personal, the hymnic, the gnomic, and the epic-mythical.

The personal element, of course, consisted in the giving of publicity and praise to the victor who commissioned the poet. This element certainly must have severely menaced the artistic perfection of the whole poem; but if the given hero were sufficiently famous, or traced his genealogy back to a member of the Pantheon, as most of them seem to have done, then this element furnished an approach to the poet's business of making the poem rise to the height of general and abiding interest.

The holding of the games was not merely Greece's means of surmounting the difficulty caused by the absence of modern clocks to mark the flight of time, as I was once told by a freshman studying Ancient History; but it was the expression of religious impulses. Back of the pleasure, joy, or fame that either the spectator or contestants gained, there was the feeling that all present were convened to do honor to some potent patron and deity. The poem which celebrated a victory won at any of these games must not entirely overlook the rendering of honor to the god whose worship gave the victor the opportunity to cover himself with glory. For this reason, we find scattered through the poems words of praise for the gods—for Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, and Heracles. Sometimes the hymnic element takes the form of a proemium.

Pindar is particularly rich in gnomic expression; but in this respect he merely emphasizes the general tendency of ancient literature, which is rarely free from the morally didactic strain. According to him, "If any man hopeth to escape the eye of God, he is grievously wrong"; "Few have gained pleasure without toil"; "Wealth adorned with virtues is the true light of man"; "The truly wise is he that knoweth much by gift of nature"; "Praise is attacked by envy." Sometimes the outlook on life is somewhat melancholy, for the "Second Olympian" tells us:—

Verily, for mortal men at least, the time when their life will end in the bourne of death is not clearly marked; no, nor the time when we shall bring a calm day, the Sun's own child, to its close amid happiness that is unimpaired.

And the "Eighth Pythian" adds to this the mournful reflection that "man is but the dream of a shadow", a statement which Shakespeare seems to echo in Hamlet, in the form, "Man is but the shadow of a dream." We are given the consolation, however, that "Under the power of noble joys, a cruel trouble is quelled and dieth away, whenever good fortune is lifted on high by a god-sent fate." The melancholy is that of the man who sees life as no bright, sweet dream; but who, on the other hand, is willing to take the bitter with the sweet and to stand up like a man against the trial that will prove his true genuineness. There is in Pindar nothing that approaches the morbid, sentimental melancholia which Thomson shows in his City of Dreadful Night.

The mythic element of the epinicion is perhaps that which gives cohesion to the whole structure, and for most people adds the strongest touch of beauty. The tendency used to be to ascribe the presence of the myth to the epic influence; but now we reverse the process because we think that there can be detected in choral-lyric the rudiments of the old heroic sagas which must have preceded the epic. In the growth of poetry, lyric must have preceded the other departments; but our evidence shows that the order of crystallization of the departments must have been epic, lyric, drama. Hence there may be some truth in the above statement; and the epic, instead of affecting, shows effects itself.

The "Fourth Pythian" is Pindar's greatest poem, both in size and in Æsthetic appeal. It deals with the Argonautic expedition, and is a famous handling of an epic theme in a lyric manner. Next to this I personally like the "Second Olympian," the "Eighth Pythian," and the "First Olympian," in the order named.

The appreciation of Pindar has varied somewhat with the ages. Dionysius of Halicarnassus remarks apropos of a dithyrambic fragment of Pindar's:—

These lines are vigorous, weighty, and dignified, and are marked by much severity of style. Though rugged, they are not unpleasantly so, and though harsh to the ear, are only so in due measure. They are slow in their rhythm, and present broad effects of harmony, and they exhibit not the showy and decorative prettiness of our own day, but the severe beauty of a distant past.

Horace says of Pindar that he—

is like a river rushing down from the mountains and over-flowing its banks. He is worthy of Apollo's bay, whether he rolls down new words through daring dithyrambs, or sings of gods and kings, or of those whom the palm of Elis makes inhabitants of heaven, or laments some youthful hero and exalts to the stars his prowess, his courage, and his golden virtue.

And Quintilian declares that—

Of lyric poetry Pindar is the peerless master, in grandeur, in maxims, in figures of speech, and in the full stream of eloquence.

Ronsard, 1550, wrote a number of odes to show le moyen de suivre Pindare; and this action was followed by a long succession of English poets who adopted what they considered to be the Pindaric method of constructing odes,—Cowley and Shadwell in the seventeenth century, and Congreve and Gray in the eighteenth.

In his Progress of Poesy Gray, indeed, speaks of the pride and the ample pinion—

That the Theban eagle bear
Sailing with supreme dominion
Thru the azure deep of air.

Matthew Arnold had a high opinion of Pindar, and paid him the compliment of imitating him in passages. "Pindar," he says, "is the poet above all others on whom the power of style seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating effect." His Merope is a copy of Pindar's ["Olympian VI"] and his eagle who—

Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feathered neck,
Nestling nearer to Jove's feet,
While o'er his sovereign eye
The curtains of the blue films slowly meet,

is from the "First Pythian" of Pindar.

Tennyson said of Pindar: "He is a sort of Australian poet; has long tracts of gravel with immensely large nuggets imbedded." Voltaire thought of Pindar only as "the inflated Theban"; but even these characterizations were less unkind than the remarks of those who saw in Pindar's lyric flights the crude gambols of a mastodon.

Fortunately, however, some scholars and critics—unprofessional as well as professional—have found Pindar to possess charm and grace in his massive gambols. Delicacy, smoothness, ease are not his; but he has a satisfying substantiality which is at once welcomed by the mind capable of understanding him. Translation of him is, at best, but a travesty; but a reading and re-reading of him in the original Greek is like successive hearings of Wagnerian music—one thinks it strange at first, but finds in it new enjoyment at each successive hearing.