Pindar

Pindar was born at Kynoskephalae,a village near Thebes, around 518 BC. He was the son of Daiphatos, who belonged to the ancient and noble family of Aigidae.

His musical education began at an early age, taught by his father, who was famous flute player and by the eminent musicians Agathocles and Apollodoros, at Athens.



He spent most of his life at Thebes and Delphi, where the oracle arranged to pronounce hymns to Gods.



When his death occurred, no one believed that his shadow from Delphi had gone. So every night before dinner, the priests had a herald to announce around the Oracle, “Pindar is coming to have dinner with the Gods,” and thus they were inviting the dead to enter the temple, where two tables of food had been prepared, one for Apollo and one for Pindar, (the so-called Theoxenia).



Thebans were calling him “the eagle of Thebes” and they compared him with the roar of the river.



During his life, Pindar was honoured among all the Greek cities for his poetry and he was often invited by tyrants and monarchs to their courts, especially by Amyntas of Macedon, Arkesilaos of Kyrene, Theron of Agrigentum and Hieron of Syracuse, where he lived from 476 to 472 BC.



Sadly, in 438 BC, at the age of eighty years old, he died in the theatre of Argos, at the time he was reciting one of his many poems.



Athenians honoured him by making him ambassador (proxenos) and erected a grand bronze statue after his death. He was fined by Thebans, for glorifying an enemy city, Athens, but subsequently they made a temple near his house, in order to accolade him.



Pindar wrote an enormous number of poems, which the Alexandrian scholars divided in seventeen books. His poetry included dithyrambs, paeans, scholia, encomia, prosodia, treni, parthenia, and epinicia, the last being the only surviving work of his, from the others we have only few fragments.



The epinicia contained 14 Olympian, 12 Pythian, 11 Nemean and 8 Isthmian odes.



He was also known as the Dircaean Swan.