Pindar - Works

Works

Pindar's strongly individual genius is apparent in all his extant compositions but, unlike Simonides and Stesichorus for example, he created no new lyrical genres. He was however innovative in his use of the genres he inherited – for example, in one of his victory odes (Olympian 3), he announces his invention of a new type of musical accompaniment, combining lyre, flute and human voice (though our knowledge of Greek music is too sketchy to allow us to understand the full nature of this innovation). Although he probably spoke Boeotian Greek he composed in a literary language that tended to rely more on the Doric dialect than his rival Bacchylides, but less insistently than Alcman. There is an admixture of other dialects, especially Aeolic and epic forms, and an occasional use of some Boeotian words. He composed 'choral' songs yet it is by no means certain that they were all sung by choirs – the use of choirs is testified only by the generally unreliable scholiasts. Scholars at the Library of Alexandria collected his compositions in seventeen books organized according to genre:

• 1 book of humnoi – "hymns"
• 1 book of paianes – "paeans"
• 2 books of dithuramboi – "dithyrambs"
• 2 books of prosodia – "processionals"
• 3 books of parthenia – "songs for maidens"
• 2 books of huporchemata – "songs for light dances"
• 1 book of enkomia – "songs of praise"
• 1 book of threnoi – "laments"
• 4 books of epinikia – "victory odes"

Of this vast and varied corpus, only the epinikia – odes written to commemorate athletic victories – survive in complete form; the rest survive only by quotations in other ancient authors or from papyrus scraps unearthed in Egypt. Even in fragmentary form however they reveal the same complexity of thought and language that are found in the victory odes. Dionysius of Halicarnassus singled out Pindar's work as an outstanding example of austere style (αὐστηρὰ ἁρμονία) but he noted its absence in the maiden songs or parthenia. One surviving fragment of a maiden song does seem to be different in tone, due however to the fact that it is spoken in the character of a girl:

Enough of his dithyrambic poetry survives for comparison with that of Bacchylides, who used it for narrative . Pindar's dithyrambs are an exuberant display of religious feeling, capturing the wild spirit of Dionysus and pointing forward to the ecstatic songs of Euripides's Bacchae. In one of these, dedicated to the Athenians and written to be sung in Spring, he depicts the divine energy of the revitalized world.