Values in Pindar

Pindar states that there is a something “greater than wealth”, a glory that surpasses all things material.  Honour in Homer is represented in a concrete manner through material prizes, but for Pindar the wealth that comes from victory is not itself the source of joy: the joy is external.  Furthermore, while Pindar does not scorn wealth and the aristocracy, he does see greed and over-ambition in a highly negative light.  Tantalus was greatly honoured by the gods:

However, he was not satisfied with his  , and was overpowered by greed, stealing from the gods the means necessary for immortality, nectar and ambrosia, and giving them to his drinking companions – and for this he was punished.  The result of his greed is suffering:     .  What we see here is one of Pindar’s core moral messages – there is a definite limit to how far man should go and strive for in life, and if he tries to surpass this, entering the realm of the divine, he will be displaying  and will be punished.  Pindar was a very religious and god-fearing man, and had a genuine and firm belief that man will be punished for excess and arrogance.

Indeed, arrogance seems to be man’s vice most condemned by the poet.  In Olympian 7.90 Pindar praises Diagoras because “he walks a straight course on a road that hates arrogance”; in Pythian 8 Peace sinks “Arrogance in the flood”; in Pythian 1 we see Pindar criticising the arrogance of the Carthaginians and Etruscans, which “brings lamentation to their ships off Cumae”.   is perhaps the fault with which man does himself the most harm in Greek literature.  Aristotle in his Poetics said that it was the primary cause of tragic heroes’ downfalls.  It is a important concept in Homer too: Achilles argues with Agamemnon in Iliad 1 because he sees the man as ‘hubristic’.  Two famous Greek maxims, “know thyself” and “nothing in excess” would both be endorsed by Pindar.  The need for self-limitation is one that we see in both shame and guilt cultures, and therefore Pindar shares this value with Homer and Aeschylus, whose values are arguably those of a shame culture, and Sophocles and Euripides, in whose plays we see more of a guilt culture.

So far we have looked at Pindar’s values in terms of man and his relationship with the divine and respect towards it; what then, of values on a purely human level?  First we can consider the values of the athlete – the “athletic ideal” as Bowra calls it.  Pindar saw in athletes the pinnacle of humanity: they possessed  in the fullest sense.  He was not, unlike Bacchylides, so much interested in the games in terms of what actually happened; moreover what concerned him was the glory that came from winning and what was required in order to win.

Victory in the games comes from three causes.  First, a man must have natural talent: his nature, or .  This may come differently to different men, but they must make use of what they have.  At Nemean 1.25 he says, “A man must walk by straight ways / And fight by his own blood.”  Pindar thinks that success runs in the genes, saying for example in Pythian 8    .  Secondly, success comes from toil and effort, , and Pindar scorns a man who thinks otherwise:

Physical effort in training and in the contest itself is of the utmost importance, but so too is intelligence.  The third cause of success is that which is beyond man’s control, the divine.  It is often the case that victory or loss occurs because of divine involvement.  Often Pindar, like Homer, is unspecific as to whether a particular god or some  is involved, but he never attributes victory to sheer luck, an alien concept to the poet.

The final question which is of great importance to the topic is that of , envy.  This can come from men as well as gods, and Pindar is careful not to praise his victors in such a way that he might appear to be deifying them; while he does not seek to incite envy in any form, it is divine envy which must be prevented at all costs, for it is this which will result in retribution.  Note Pythian 10.20-21: “Let the gods not envy them and change their fortune.”  There was a school of thought at the time of Pindar, says Bowra, that the object of  – the man who incited envy for his athletic success – shared as much guilt as the man who felt the envy.  Perhaps this is because feeling envy is something which man has no control over, whereas winning is something he does.  Indeed, there is an extract in Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras in which Pythagoras advises his friend Eurymenes to compete in the Olympian Games, but not to win.  Winning was said to have corrupted man’s character: {rc¥j ka¸ ¢gemon·aj ½meroj ka¸ filoneik·ai doxomane¹j kat™cousi, a quote found in the same Life of Pythagoras.  Pindar saw envy as perhaps an inevitable side-effect of success, but thought that envy was preferable to pity.  He says in Pythian 1.85:     ,   .  This point not only shows us his views on pity, it is also an example of values indicative of shame-culture.  Pity and envy are feelings held by others, and Pindar thinks in terms of such feelings.  What is important to the poet was what others felt of the victor, not how the victor himself felt.

The values in Pindar’s poetry are archaic; they are those of a shame-culture, in which man acts not from motives within – guilt and the desire to do what is right – but judging his successes and failures from how other people see them.  A useful example comes in Pythian 8.

The feelings of shame, rather than those of personal failure, are what “bite” the losers.

This distinction between shame and guilty-cultures is applicable in a non-divine aspect.  In terms of man’s relationship with gods Pindar shares the beliefs of those before and those after him, for these beliefs are palpably clear: do not be greedy, do not strive to be more than you are, “nothing in excess”.  The moral message that pervades Greek tragedy is that man should live with due measure, and this indeed is the one what pervades Pindar.