Pindar’s Life in vitae and in Scholia to His Poetry
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i3.01Keywords:
Greek poetry, Pindar, understanding of poetry, vitae of the poets, scholiaAbstract
In the canon of Greek lyric poets, Pindar was placed first by the librarians of Alexandria. He became the master lyricist, although he does not seem to be a model of metrical regularity in his songs in honor of the victors of the athletic games, the only part of his poetry that has survived almost intact. Moreover, even Pindar’s compatriots, despite their love of measure, calibration, and clarity, considered his poetic language obscure. He himself spoke of the need to interpret his poetry, or what it referred to. The interpretation of a poet’s work through his life, on the other hand, had already appeared among the Greeks. The linking of work and life began in the vitae, which, as far as the poets of the archaic period were concerned, were not written down until several centuries after their deaths and developed into a literary genre of their own. Given the scarcity of other material, the vitae in the case of the lyric poets rely mainly on their first-person statements. Their main feature, therefore, is the extraction of the life from the work, the portrait of the man suggested by the work itself. Pindar’s vitae thus foreground his piety. Biographisation, however, with its inevitable fictional gesture, is also found in scholiastic writing on Pindar’s poetry, which likewise originated in Alexandria. But the (in)found biographical information that effectively contributes to the construction of the anecdotal-legendary stories in the vitae is reversed in the scholia and becomes the key to unlocking the text.
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