Pindar’s Athlete in Pythian 8

This essay quotes the English translation edited by Diane Arnson Svarlien on the very useful Tufts Perseus website. Line numbers are in parentheses.


     Apart from Classicists, who reads Pindar? And yet we have a generous share of his poetry though it is a small fraction of his collected works. Several factors may play a role apart from the general decay of interest in antiquity. Pindar depends on his readers’ familiarity with the immense web of mythology by which the Greeks and, indeed, all pre-modern people made sense of their world. Like most writers immersed in a living culture, he assumes that he need not narrate the stories of the gods and heroes but need only allude to them, often in fleeting and oblique references. Even the specialist may consult a reference now and then for names and stories that Pindar’s original audience knew from childhood. Footnotes and a Classical encyclopedia with a modicum of patience and rereading can remedy this defect for the motivated reader, but I suspect there is another way in which contemporary American culture has deviated from the ancient Greek’s that might interfere with our appreciation of his writing.
     Though American now has gymnasia springing up on every corner and joggers jostle each other in parks and roadsides, athletics had an even more prominent place in Thebes in the fifth century B.C.E. In part perhaps due to the need to be prepared for total mobilization in wartime, in part associated with a pervasive homoeroticism, and in part reflecting the pursuit of arête in all fields, athletics was celebrated by the Greeks. In my own youth we assumed that intellectuals and athletes were largely mutually exclusive categories, often antagonistic. Physical “education” has always seemed to me a contradiction, and university athletics a maddeningly unjustifiable distraction in higher education. Never in my adult life have I watched a sporting event. Yet I adore Pindar, most of whose surviving works are in praise of victors in competitive athletic contests. What did physical culture mean in the ancient world?
     For all today’s fashion for fitness, we are likely to be surprised when Socrates upbraids Epigenes for being out of shape. [1] Socrates cites many reasons in support of universal physical conditioning, noting first of all that a good citizen must always be prepared for war. Yet he does not stop there. He maintains that workouts lead to not only better health and longevity, but also to better cognitive function. Finally he notes that “it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.” Here is an almost aesthetic argument: pride should lead to exercise from a desire to excel not in functional strength alone but in beauty as well and not merely the beauty of a buff physique, but that associated with fulfilling one’s potential.
     As a professional poet Pindar may have written his victory odes for the same reason that another gifted writer might compose soft drink jingles, because someone will pay for such a product. But, apart from effusive praise of the winners, their families and hometown, he includes a more elaborate and subtle version of the final justification offered by Socrates.
     According to Pindar, “with a willing mind” a person “may observe a certain harmony on every step of my way.” (66-7) That harmony is the experience of the deep order present in the kosmos which one may glimpse through excellence of any sort.
     The poem opens with an address to Hesychia, a personification of peace and serenity, associated with Aigina as a well-ruled thriving city. It may seem incongruous that a figure of peace should also be identified as “holding the supreme keys of counsels and of wars,” (3-4), but Hesychia is described as daughter of Justice, and justice, of course, requires enforcement and, at times, even coercion. The kind of calm Pindar has in mind is not empty, but rather a beautiful order of the sort the Greeks saw in the universe as a whole. The Greek word cosmos (κόσμος) fundamentally means well-organized, and has both moral and aesthetic dimensions, being used to indicate good behavior or morality and also beauty. Only when a system is properly ordered may it be quiet and calm.
     This peace may be threatened by forces represented in mythological terms by monsters and giants. In Pythian 8 these are Typhoeus and Porphyrion who are defeated by Zeus and Apollo respectively. The successful battle against these archaic forces of evil by gods associated with Hesychia is the theme of the first triad of the poem. The same Apollo that overcame disorder in the past welcomes the victor in the present day.
     The second triad praises the excellence of the rulers of Aigina, the Aiakidai, descendents of Aiakos, son of Aigina and Zeus and the origin of the family of the Meidulidai to which Aristomenes belonged. Aigina had a close relationship to the poet’s own city of Thebes and a disproportionate number of his odes are concerned with athletes from that island. Though mentioning other prominent athletes from Aigina, he turns in the epode from the heroic activities of these Aiginitans‎ in a rhetorical apophasis, saying he cannot linger on their greatness but can only speak of Aristomenes, “the nearest of all beautiful things,” and in this way “take flight” through art. At the end of the epode he makes a transition from Aigina to his own city of Thebes by mentioning the words of the prophet Amphiaraus who saw there “by nature the genuine spirit of the fathers is conspicuous in the sons.” (45-6)
     By lauding the deeds of Alcmaeon and Adrastus he not only provides a conventional if oblique compliment to Aristomenes, he also places the action of the athletic contest of the present in the context of the legendary past and places the living individuals in a lineage that includes Oedipus, and Laius, Labdacus, and Cadmus before him. These stories legitimize and transform the suffering and struggles of the present by placing them in perspective as inevitable and divinely ordained, an opportunity for heroes to realize their own heroism.
     Among the countless details of the mythic patterns that shape the poet’s view of the Theban wrestler’s victory are the circumstances of Amphiarus’ participation in the campaign of the epigonoi. The seer himself is a type like Achilles of fortitude in the face of an adverse destiny and his son Alkmaion’s qualities magnify the achievement of Aristomenes. Alkmaion is said to be the poet’s “neighbor” and “guardian” of his possessions as well as the source of prophetic oracles. (56-60) According to Diodorus Alkmaion was persuaded to participate in the attack against his first inclinations by his mother Eriphyle who had been bribed by Thersander with the necklace or, in some versions, the robe of Harmonia, objects which had already a history of cursing their owners. This incident, clearly a doublet of her earlier sending her husband into battle due to being offered the very same necklace by Polynices, casts an ambiguous light on harmony and order itself. Here harmony leads to deception and death and consequently to the violation of taboo when Alkmaion later kills his mother in revenge.
     The web of myth invoked by the poet connects with the present through innumerable other associations, introducing not only a rich and rounded vision, but one that highlights irreducible radical ambivalence. Yet he is altogether sincere in his invocation of Hesychia because arête is a refuge from the unwinnable game of life. One is uplifted through the practice of excellence by a miraculous afflatus. A parallel role is played by the phorminx or lyre in Pythian 1 whose music is said to bring calm and order even to the world of the gods.
     The redemptive power of developing one’s abilities “to the highest limit” is what Socrates recommended to Epigenes, saying that only in that way might he might see “what manner of man you may become.” And the motive is urgent. Buddha’s preaching pictured the unenlightened consciousness in this harsh world as a man whose house is burning or who has been struck by a poisoned arrow. Though Pindar does not use such dramatic images, he looks at life with open eyes and finds the human existential circumstance not merely threatening but approaching the unbearable. The problem inspires some the poet’s loftiest moralizing, familiar sententiae to be sure, but informed here by passion and depth. The conclusion of this poem celebrating human achievement focuses instead on human impotence.


But the delight of mortals grows in a short time, and then it falls to the ground, shaken by an adverse thought. [95] Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow. (96)


This last phrase echoes the very language of the celebrated gatha in the Diamond Sutra.


All conditioned dharmas
Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows,
Like dew drops or a lightning flash.


     Hanging in a void, feet resting on nothing, one can yet feel a sort of liberation in the thrill of art, a kind of yogic focus in extraordinary athletic achievement, a thrill at acts of unusual wisdom, compassion, or courage. In celebrating the victor of a wrestling match, Pindar celebrates the human species, which in the face of mortality and suffering, nonetheless strives, and sometimes succeeds, in bathing in the “shining light” of Zeus, and, for a time at least, experiencing a “gentle lifetime.” By ignoring ESPN, perhaps I have failed to note that fans of NFL are, in their own way, seeking spiritual sustenance along with beer and chips. Pindar might have thought so.


1. Xenophon, Memorabilia of Socrates, 3.12.1 -13.