III.

Works

Pindar represents the culmination of the Greek choral lyric, composed to be sung to a musical accompaniment by choruses of young people, as distinguished from the personal lyric, to be sung or chanted by a single voice. Pindar composed hymns to the gods, dithyrambs, processional odes, dancing songs, dirges, and encomia, but only fragments of these have survived. His extant works, believed to be about one-fourth of his total production, are 44 epinician, or triumphal, odes, composed in honor of the victors at the four great national games, the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean. They display the intricate structure, the lofty moral sentiment, and the deeply religious feeling for which the Greek choral lyric was noted.

Pindar's regular procedure in praising the victors at the games was to insert into the central portion of the poem a myth, either expressing the dominant mood of the occasion or connecting the victorious hero with the mythical past. He shows the Greek myths in transition from their treatment by the epic poets to the forms they assumed in Attic tragedy. Pindar also introduces into his odes numerous moral and religious reflections, and he proclaims the immortality of the soul and a future judgment.