With Lyre and Flute

Pindar in Antiquity

Abstract

The discussion deals with Pindar, the greatest Greek lyric poet, who was called princeps lyricorum by Quintilian. Of Pindar’s poetic genres, only the epinicians, songs in honor of the victors of the Panhellenic games, have survived. However, they have not survived in their original form, in which the poem existed together with music and dance. Only the text came down to us from Pindar’s epinicians, and it was only Alexandrian scholarship that established it with the triadic stanzaic structure on the basis of the available manuscripts. In the Alexandrian edition, each of Pindar’s epinicians has its own foot combinations in strophes, antistrophes and epodes, but at the same time also interstrophic and interepodic responsions. The discussion then focuses on the reception of Pindar’s poetry by Callimachus, the most characteristic Greek poet of the Hellenistic period, and by Horace, the most famous Roman lyricist. It points out Callimachus’ application of Pindar’s principle of ‘elaborating little in what is much’ as regards the presentation of myth, while in Horace it highlights the image of Pindar as a raging mountain river. In Horace’s image, that of the metrical wild man, Pindar shows a Dionysian face instead of the enigmatic Apollonian one he showed to the Alexandrian scholars. This duality also characterizes the later reception of Pindar in the West.