Richard Claverhouse Jebb on Pindar

“He began his poetical career at the age of twenty, with an ode on a Thessalian youth's victory in the games. He grew to be the national lyrist of Greece. It is a sign of the coming time that he also pays his homage to Athens,—"the bulwark of Hellas," the city that "laid the foundation of freedom."”

“Pindar usually takes some heroic legend or group of legends connected with the victor or the victor's city, and makes this his main theme... In treating the legends, Pindar aims especially at bringing out their moral, and applying this to the victor or his city. If we wish to understand Pindar's place among his contemporaries, we must never forget how closely these legends which he interpreted were bound up with Greek religion, and with the belief of Greek cities and great Greek families about their own origin.”

“The loss of the music by which Pindar's Odes were accompanied deprives us of an indispensable aid to the comprehension of their effect as works of art. And, if the music were extant, modern imagination would still have to supply the scenic accessories of a gorgeous festival, the light, the colour, the movement, the glowing sympathy of a brilliant audience with the newly won or freshly remembered victory which shed a reflected lustre on the victor's native city, the thrill of patriotic pride responding to each allusion, faint or dark, perhaps, for us, that touched some household word of inherited renown, the sense of deepened spiritual life with which Greeks for whom the faith of their fathers was still a vital force heard the secret lessons of divine lore drawn forth by that great poet of all Greece in whom the priests of the Delphian Apollo revered the full inspiration of their god. Pindar's achievement cannot be measured by a literary criticism of his text. The glory of his song has passed for ever from the world with the sound of the rolling harmonies on which it once was borne, with the splendour of rushing chariots and athletic forms around which it threw its radiance, with the white-pillared cities by the Aegean or Sicilian sea in which it wrought its spell, with the beliefs or joys which it ennobled; but those who love his poetry, and who strive to enter into its high places, can still know that they breathe a pure and bracing air, and can still feel vibrating through a clear calm sky the strong pulse of the eagle's wings as he soars with steady eyes against the sun.”