Pindar, ‘Pythian 2’
[The Greek from which this has been translated is here]
μεγαλοπόλιες ὦ Συράκοσαι …”
[Strophe A]
Syracuse, megalopolis! Deep-plunged in war,
temple of Ares, home to men and horses, steel-delighting nourisher:
I come to you from gleaming Thebes with this song
with news of a four-horse chariot to make the earth shake! —
the one that brought top steersman Hieron victory,
adorning far-shining Ortygia with crowns —
riverine home of Artemis: with her help
he guided, hands easy on multicoloured reins, those horses,
[Antistrophe A]
after the archer virgin-goddess, with both hands,
and the god of games Hermes’ help, arranged the bright harness [10]
the polished car, the guiding bit, well-yoked to
strong horses, and invoking the wide-ruling god’s own trident.
Other men pay their various tributes,
hymn the various excellences of other kings,
and some in flowing voices often sing of Cinyras
famous among Cypriots, who had a hearty friend in gold-haired Apollo,
[Epode A]
and was Aphrodite’s loyal priest, whose gratitude for the help of friends goes both ways.
To you, Deinomenes’ son, from before the Zephyr’s house
the Lokrian virgin-singer calls from the desperate tumult of war
thanking you for your power: her gaze is immoveable. [20]
The gods’ command is Ixion’s message to mortals,
words from his wing-spinning wheel
turning entirely around:
‘pay-back your benefactor with gentle gratitude!’
[Strophe B]
This was his education. Having gained, among the friendly children of Cronus,
a sweet life, his joy was short-lasting, for he grew crazy-headed
and fell in love with Hera herself, true spouse of Zeus,
blissed-out — his hubris drove him to delusive overreaching,
pushed him on, and he soon suffered man’s lot,
fitted to an extraordinary torment, his doubled offence [30]
brought this pain upon him (for this ‘hero’
was also the first man to stain mortality with a kinsman’s blood)
[Antistrophe B]
and then in the furthest reaches of her bedroom
he affronted Zeus’s wife. Everything depends upon your status.
Illicit love acts? — into the slough of punishment
with you! They caught him having sex with a cloud:
a man deceived: that sweet lie,
it was the spitting image of the most lovely goddess
the daughter of Cronus, a divinely-set trick to trap him
Zeus-built, a fine-looking calamity. Bound to the four-spoked wheel [40]
[Epode B]
made of his destruction, clapped into inescapable manacles, he finally understands.
Unblessed by the Graces, he was an arrogant kid,
unprecedented, freak child of a freak mother, violating the ways of men, breaking divine law:
raising him she called him Centaur — he
fucked horses in Magnesia, on Pelia’s foothills, and begat a horde —
astonishing! Both parents’
resemblance was there, mother in the lower part, father in the upper.
[Strophe C]
God achieves his ends exactly as he pleases —
God, faster than the winged eagle, who outswims the sea-grown [50]
dolphin, who compels obeisance from the haughtiest mortals,
who, to some, gifts a fame that never ages. Only let me
escape the griping chew of slander.
From my belated far-vantage I have seen
the bitter Archilochus satiate his suffering with a diet
of hatred. It is wealth, the gift of fate, that is the best wisdom.
[Antistrophe C]
Clearly you have a perfectly free soul to show to the world:
master-commander of multitudinous streets, battlements, men. If any
claim there now exists a man as rich or great
or any Greek greater than you, living or dead, [60]
his leaky soul struggles in vain!
In a ship garlanded with fine flowers I raise up your brilliance
to the sound of rushing water, young men’s courage a help
in fearsome war: in their name I announce your own endless celebrity
[Epode C]
among horse-mastering cavalrymen and footsoldiers — full grown determination
frees me to donate all the poetic words
conveying your praiseworthiness as a greeting: like Phoenician merchandise,
this text is being transported across the grizzled sea,
and likewise the ‘Castor-song’, in its Aeolic metre, the way you like the strings
tuned to seven tones, to grace your senses [70]
as the lyre reaches you.
Labour to know yourself! Children may be delighted by a monkey -
[Strophe D]
delighted! — but Rhadamanthus has surpassed himself, having acquired
the gift of blamelessness, his soul never amused by any trickery
of the kind that whispers itself into mortal life.
Those who trade in slander are a doubled evil.
Their attenuated natures are fox-like.
In what ways do they really benefit themselves, the cunning ones?
For while the rest of the fisherman’s gear tangled in the depths
of the sea with all of it, I bob cork-like over the surface. [80]
[Antistrophe D]
The deceitful man cannot make fine verse for good people,
however much he fawns on them; he only weaves his own tangled woe.
I do not share his impertinence: I am a friend to my friend,
though hostile to an enemy, pursuing him like a wolf
tracking him this way and that however twisting the path.
Under every legal governance the well-speaking man prospers:
in an autocratic system, or under the excitable rule of the mob,
or when the wise watch over the city. We must not fight against the gods,
[Epode D]
though they sometimes raise these men’s fortunes, and sometimes those others
get the greater kudos. Not that the mind [90]
of the envious man is ever soothed. Stretch the plumb-line
too far and cut a hurting wound into the heart itself
before he gains what he anxiously aims at in his thoughts.
Better to accept the lightweight yoke as it’s settled on you
as an aid: for, against the pricks
kicking becomes
a slippery business. I only hope to find fame among the companionable Good.
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The principle here is that I translate line for line (the difficulty is that Greek, an inflected language, differs from English in the kinds of word orders and distances in a sentence between related words permissible: often two words that would go next to one another naturally in English are in different lines in a Greek poem and so on. But I have stuck with my principle). If a word is repeated, I translate it with the same English term, even if the result looks a bit ungainly (like ‘hands’ and ‘hands’ in lines 8 and 9). It’s not that I’m looking to uglify or obscurify my translation — on the contrary, within those constraints, I have aimed to make the English version as comprehensible, flowing and vividly written as possible. It’s that I made this translation in the first instance as a way of reading Pindar’s poem: trying to appreciate it, to understand it; so I wanted it to be close. Or ‘close’.
A few notes. For Hieron, ‘tyrant’ (autocratic ruler) of Syracuse in Sicily, the addressee of several of Pindar’s praising odes, see here — scroll down. His horses and chariots won various prizes at various Greek games, although the specific game is not identified here. Pindar praises Syracuse for its success making war (for instance, against the Etruscans) and for its sporting triumphs. ‘The god who holds the trident’ in line 12 is Poseidon, ocean divinity who was also patron god of horses. Cinyras (line 15) was a hero and legendary king of Cyprus, consort of Aphrodite and the father of Adonis (Pindar’s eighth Nemean, line 18, mentions Cinyras as being fabulously rich). The ‘son of Deinomenes’ mentioned in line 18 is Hieron himself. The poem then relates the myth of Ixion at some length; welcomed by the Olympian gods (line 26’s ‘the children of Cronus’) he abused their hospitality by trying to have sex with Hera, Zeus’s wife; though in the event the gods made a simulacrum of Hera out of cloud, and that’s what he had sex with, in one of the rooms in Hera’s heavenly palace — until the gods burst in upon him and bound him to a burning wheel forever.
In its second half of the ode moves to a discussion of the proper role of speech, with a particular focus on the poet’s speech. Don’t, says Pindar, be like Archilochus (line 55) the famous 7th-century BC poet, who was nasty about folk and traded in criticism and invective — (although, it seems, not really: ‘ancient commentators focused on Archilochus’s lampoons and on the virulence of his invective, although his extant verses, most of which come from Egyptian papyri, actually indicate a very wide range of poetic interests’). Instead, says Pindar, a poet should concentrate on praise, on returning kindness with gratitude. To that end, Pindar says, he is sending this very ode across the ocean (from his native Thebes to Sicily) like a cargo of precious Phoenician merchandise (68–69). It’s a famous image, one that Matthew Arnold draws on for the brilliant final two stanzas of 1853’s ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ (‘Tyrian’ means ‘from Tyre’, a Phoenician city):
Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!
— As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-hair’d creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Ægæan Isles;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steep’d in brine —
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,The young light-hearted masters of the waves —
And snatch’d his rudder, and shook out more sail;
And day and night held on indignantly
O’er the blue Midland waters with the gale,
Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,
To where the Atlantic raves
Outside the western straits; and unbent sails
There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,
Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;
And on the beach undid his corded bales.
Arnold inverts Pindar’s image, and then riffs expansively upon it: the direction of travel is the same, westward, and the traded goods are, as in Pythian 2, actually a way of talking about poetry, and more broadly culture; but Arnold turns the allusion into a way of articulating the transition from classical culture to the darker, stormier Atlantic culture of modernity.
To go back to Pindar: there is a lot of debate about what line 69 (‘and likewise the “Castor-song”, in its Aeolic metre…’) is saying. It seems to be a hinge moment: after his reference to his poem as Phoenician traded goods, Pindar says he is going to offer Hieron another poem, perhaps (critics argue over this) a ‘free’ poem, in Aeolic metre. Pythian 2 is in this metre, one scholars sometimes call ‘logaoedic measure’ (from λόγος in the sense of prose: it’s a mixture of trochees and tribrachs — about half Pindar’s odes are in this metre; the other half, save only two, are in the ‘Dorian’ metre, a mixture of dactyls and epitrites). This new poem, says Pindar will, be a ‘Castor-song’ (Καστόρειος) — or perhaps it’s Pythian 2 itself that is the Castor-song. As to what a ‘Castor-song’ is: well, no-one knows for sure. Some experts say that it’s hymn in praise of sporting prowess (since Castor was a notable horseman); others say (since Castor was the son of the legendary Spartan king Tyndareus) that it was ‘a song, sung by the Spartans before a battle, to animate their courage , and make them despise death’. It’s also possible a ‘Castor-song’ is just what it sounds like: a poem in praise of the mythological figure Castor. Anyway, having given Heiron seventy lines of ‘epinikean’ writing — an ode ‘about’ (epi) sporting ‘victory’ (niké) — Pindar is now talking about this other kind of poem. You can read the lines for yourself and see what you think: is Pindar promising Hieron a quite other kind of poem? Or is the idea, as some Pindarian scholars think, that the first two thirds of Pythian 2 are a regular epinikean, and the remaining lines are this gratis addition, a Castor-poem?
[A couple more notes on specifics of my rendering: ‘blissed out’ (line 28) is πολυγηθής: ‘much-cheering, delightful, gladsome’. Line 77’s ‘attenuated natures’ of the slanderers looks odd, but is just what the Greek says: ἀτενής, atenēs means ‘stretched, drawn-out, strained’. My line 81 (‘the deceitful man cannot make fine verse for good people’) is a bit of a reach: the operant word is ἔπος, which means ‘something spoken’ ‘word’ ‘word as opposed to deed’ but also means ‘a line of poetry’ and is therefore, in the plural, where we get the word epic (Pindar describes his epos here as κραταιός, ‘strong, forceful, mighty’). Most commentators go for the first of these meanings: ‘a deceitful citizen can never utter a word of force among noble men’ and ‘the deceitful citizen cannot utter an effective word among good men’ are the two Loeb (1924 and 1997) versions. But I like the idea that Pindar, as with his slighting reference to Archilochus — in his day, perhaps the most famous poet after Homer, a rival lyric poet from Pindar’s grandfather’s generation — is here engaging with poetry as such. What else? Well, Richard Lattimore’s translation of this ode, and indeed all Pindar’s odes, is available free online at archive.org. You could read his version and compare it with mine, if you liked. Or not. Suit yourself.]
+++
Dipping my toe into the secondary criticism about Pythian 2, I wonder if it is the single most discussed, analysed and argued-over poem in all of Pindar. Critics go into immense detail on every little thing about his poem: the plumb-line reference at the end, the mention of monkeys delighting children — everything. Here, for example, is an essay by D. E. Gerber [‘Pythian 2.56’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 91 (1960), 100–108] all about that one line, 56 — in fact not even about the whole line, but just the latter bit of it. ‘As is frequently the case in attempting to explain a passage in Pindar, one is beset not only with the normal difficulties of language present in Greek lyric poetry, but also with a style which is so abbreviated and concise as to render many of the thoughts and images almost unintelligible. One poem for which this is particularly true is the Second Pythian, a poem which, in the words of C. M. Bowra, is “full of mysteries.” Not least among these “mysteries” is the exact meaning and grammatical exegesis of verse 56: τὸ πλουτεῖν δὲ σὺν τύχᾳ πότμου σοφίας ἄριστον.’ Gerber comes up with five possible meanings.
I’ve gone with something quite plain in my version: ‘it is wealth, the gift of fate, that is the best wisdom.’ Sandys’s 1924 Loeb has ‘Wealth, with wisdom allotted thereto, is the best gift of Fortune’; Lattimore goes with ‘to be rich, with fortune of wisdom also, is the highest destiny’.
One question over which the critics argue is whether ‘ploutein denotes material wealth, or the wealth of wisdom … whether the word is meant literally or metaphorically.’ Gerber thinks it’s meant literally, and he adds: ‘ploutos in Pindar is concrete and therefore could not be understood metaphorically as “wealth of wisdom” … although we must remember that ploutos, particularly to the aristocratic Pindar, may be considerably more than wealth in its purely economic, or even in its social, sense. It may also be the sign of breeding and divine favour. Ploutos, however, always includes material prosperity and is never used metaphorically of a mental state.’
W B Henry suggests the meaning of the line is ‘to be wealthy [as and when fortune brings] is the best (part) of wisdom … It is God who is in control of men’s fortunes (lines 49–52), and Pindar must not have recourse to slander if others are more successful than he (line 52f.): for he has seen Archilochus in his helplessness taking pleasure in insults, but the best of wisdom is to accept wealth as and when fortune grants it (54–6). To Hieron it has been granted more than to any other man (57–61).
That all makes sense, but I’m going to spin-off a different reading from the line. Agreed: wealth, for Pindar, means actual, material wealth. And writing poems, for money, in praise of wealthy men like Hieron (who can afford to pay handsomely for such praise) is, in effect, Pindar’s job. Wealth is not a metaphor, but a reality: actual coins, actual possessions, actual status. And that’s this poem. It is unashamed of its nature as an item to be traded, like Tyrian goods: manufactured by Pindar and sold to Hieron. Because, as that disputed line 56 says, wealth honestly acquired is good — is in fact one of the highest goods. Or not ‘honestly’ acquired, so much as: acquired in a way that does not upset the gods.
The poem circles, in its odic structure, from praise of Hieron as general and sportsman, to a warning about the dangers of over-reaching yourself and giving in to bad desires in the story to Ixion, returning to praise for Hieron’s ‘endless celebrity’, to warning against the envious and deceitful man. The circular pattern is two other things: the track round which, to Hieron’s glory, chariots race (and the wheels of those chariots as they turn) — and the wheel to which Ixion is fixed, which spins through the sky to his shame. Round and round. And it’s one other thing I think, mentioned in the poem but perhaps not spelled out: the roundness of actual money. Hieron issued many coins during his rule, all with his stylised head on the recto and often horses or chariots on the verso. I think these circles, literal wealth, roll through Pythian 2. They’re very collectible, it seems, these coins: eBay has many on sale, prices ranging from £150 to £400. Some of these show chariot teams, as at the head of this post, or in this stater:
Some have a war-horse on them, as here:
You can see the tyrant’s name, ‘Hieronos’, under the horse there. All very equine, all very potent, military ordnance, circular coinage — all wealth.
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Round and round. Ixion’s punishment is dizzying, painful, but its literal circularity actualises a sense of punishment as endless — Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up that slope (unmentioned in this poem, of course) is another version of this. It’s a left-field connection, since I’ve no evidence Lowell was thinking of Pindar when he wrote this poem, but working through Pythian 2 put me in mind of Lowell’s ‘July in Washington’ (1964). Here the wheel spins in ways that hurt America, or perhaps hurt the whole world — the US Capitol Building, with its circular cupola, and its wheeled arrays of politicians, stands near the Potomac.
The stiff spokes of this wheel
touch the sore spots of the earth.On the Potomac, swan-white
power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.
Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair,
raccoons clean their meat in the creek.On the circles, green statues ride like South American
liberators above the breeding vegetation –prongs and spearheads of some equatorial
backland that will inherit the globe.The elect, the elected … they come here bright as dimes,
and die dishevelled and soft.We cannot name their names, or number their dates –
circle on circle, like rings on a tree –but we wish the river had another shore,
some further range of delectable mountains,distant hills powdered blue as a girl’s eyelid.
It seems the least little shove would land us
there,that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies
we no longer control could drag us back.
‘Bright as dimes’ is what Pindar is getting at in Pythian 2, though without Lowell’s irony — for Pindar the coins are actually bright, the spokes of Hieron’s military-political-sporting wheel marvellous, impressive, God-delighting, the chariot rolls on its spoked wheels round the racecourse to glory and wealth.
