The Aristocracy: Conflict and Transformation
From Werner Jaeger's, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture
Sections
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part One
Mainland Reactionaries
Thus far, we have traced the influence of Ionian culture on the Greeks of the mainland and the west only in the religious and political struggles of Solon's Athens and in Xenophanes' crusade against traditional religion and the athletic ideals of the old nobility. The enemies of the aristocracy described their ideas as narrow and limited, themselves as muscle-bound, old-fashioned and anti-intellectual. Still, they were a powerful social force, quite apart from their numerical influence, and they offered a stern spiritual and intellectual resistance to the innovators. It must not be forgotten that, after Solon, who was more affected by Ionian influences than any of his successors, many of the poets of Greece proper were passionate reactionaries. The two leaders of the reaction towards the end of the sixth century, Pindar the Theban and Theognis the Megarian, were both filled with whole-hearted admiration for the aristocracy to which they themselves belonged. Their work was addressed to the nobles, who had nothing but repulsion and distrust for the social revolution inspired by Ionian ideas. Yet these nobles did not live in a world which was a peaceful survival from the past, but in one which was incessantly invaded by the new age, and forced to defend itself with passionate energy. It was through that struggle for spiritual and material survival that the aristocracy acquired its fundamental conviction of its own innate value. Since we meet that conviction again and again in Theognis and Pindar, we must study them together, as representatives of a common cause, although there is a vast difference between their characters and their artistic achievements. For, while Pindar's work was in the field of choral lyric, and Theognis' in that of gnomic poetry, the two poets jointly represent one and the same stage in the history of culture. They are inspired by the class-consciousness of the nobility, with its proud assurance of its own merits: they embody the aristocratic ideal of culture, as it was towards the end of the sixth century.
Thus carefully and authoritatively stated by Pindar and Theognis, the aristocratic ideal of Greece proper was innately superior in educational weight and completeness to the Ionian ideal, with its various self-contradictory attempts to glorify natural life and individual personality. Not only Hesiod, Tyrtaeus, and Solon, but Pindar and Theognis too, deliberately set out to educate their hearers; and in that purpose above all they differ from the ingenuous naturalism of all Ionian art and thought. No doubt the collision between the two sets of ideals intensified the character of both: yet that collision can hardly be the sole, or even the chief, reason for the fact that all the truly great educators of Greece appear to belong to the mainland tribes. Of course, the rule of the aristocracy (from which all impulses to higher culture arose) lasted longer on the mainland than in Ionia; and it may be partly because of that survival that any new movement there was necessarily embodied in a definite new human ideal opposed to the existing type. Xenophanes, proudly aware of his own intellectual energy, attacked the old feudal ideal as outworn and fossilized; yet in Pindar and Theognis that same ideal sprang suddenly into an astonishing new moral and religious vigour. They never allow us to forget their social position and the nature of the class which they address and represent; but their poetry is rooted in the ageless depths of humanity. Yet we must not be misled by the unwavering energy with which they proclaim their faith, into forgetting that they were defending a dying world. Their poetry did not commence a renaissance of the aristocracy in political and social life; still, it eternalized the aristocratic ideal at the moment when it was most gravely endangered by new forces, and it made the socially constructive powers of that ideal into a permanent possession of the Greek nation.
We owe it to the poets alone that we have any conception of the life and social condition of the Greek nobility in the sixth and fifth centuries. The plastic arts and the scanty remains of historians who deal with the period can only serve as illustrations of the essential truths which poetry has preserved. Of course the evidence of sculpture, architecture, and vase-painting is extremely valuable, but it cannot give us reliable information unless we study it as an expression of the ideals already stated by the poets. We must therefore dispense with a comprehensive historical account of social changes in Greece during that period, although we can trace a few of the principal events which occurred in important cities. The only complete picture we can construct--although it too has serious gaps—is that of the development of the Greek mind as expressed in books. Theognis and Pindar, each in a different way, provide two highly important masses of evidence for that process. (The recently discovered choral poetry of Bacchylides, which had previously been almost unknown, merely shows that Pindar's evidence, though scanty, is sufficient.) We may deal with Theognis first: because he was probably the elder of the two poets, and because he illustrates the dangerous social situation of the aristocracy during this period, whereas Pindar rather expresses its religious beliefs and its ideal of human character. [^]
Part Two
Theognis: the Codification of the Aristocratic Educational Tradition
Theognis' book of 'Sayings to Cyrnus' belongs to the same species as Hesiod's Works and Daysand the maxims of Phocylides. It is a collection of 'teachings'. 'I shall teach you, Cyrnus, in friendly fashion, the things which I myself learnt from the nobles when I was still a boy'. The essence of his teaching therefore is that it is not the ideas of Theognis himself but the tradition of his class. An early attempt to reduce the principles of aristocratic culture and training to poetry was the Teachings of Chiron, mentioned in a previous chapter. The aphorisms of Phocylides of Miletus are meant to be general guides to the conduct of life. The new attitude of Theognis is particularly significant when contrasted with the work of Phocylides on the one hand and of Hesiod on the other. His aim is to expound all the principles of aristocratic education, the hallowed doctrines which until he wrote had only been verbally transmitted from father to son. Thus his work is a deliberate parallel and contrast to Hesiod's codification of the principles of peasant wisdom. [^]
Theognis v Solon
For many years the severe eukosmia ("good order" or "well-ordered arrangement") of the noblemen's symposia under the rule of Eros remained unshaken. But the time of Theognis saw a change. From Solon's poetry we have seen how the aristocracy had to fight for its position either against the threat of tyranny or against the growing power of the common people. By Solon the nobles are presented as a narrow and exclusive party, whose political supremacy meant wasteful misgovernment and caused the suppressed masses to thrust huge and dangerous demands upon the state. The danger thus created had prompted Solon to construct his system of political morality, with its attempt to uphold the mean between the extremes and to guard the state from tyranny. The poems of Theognis too assume that the class-war is in full fury. At the beginning of his book he sets several fairly long poems which cast an interesting light on the whole condition of society. The first elegy is obviously modelled on Solon's poetry, in style, structure, and emotional tone. But there is an important difference: for Solon, -- though himself an aristocrat, knew the weaknesses of his class as well as its merits, and taxes it with them; while Theognis asserts that the opponents of aristocracy alone are responsible for the unrest and injustice which fill his city. Clearly the situation in Megara had developed to the disadvantage of the old landowning nobility. The leaders, he says, are distorting justice and spoiling the people: they are greedy for money and for ever greater power. He foretells that the peace which holds the city at present will end in civil war, and then in tyranny. The only remedy which he seems to know is that the state should return to the old constitution, in which the aristocracy holds its rightful privileges: and that remedy seems to be impossible of attainment. [^]
Theognis v Hesiod
A second poem completes this gloomy picture. 'The city is still the same, but its people have changed. Men who never knew anything of justice and the law, but wore away goatskins on their ribs and laired outside the city like wild deer-these men are now the nobles, Cyrnus, and those who once were noble are now poor wretches. It is an unbearable sight! And they laugh at one another and deceive one another and know no steady standard to tell them what is noble and ignoble, because they have no tradition. Make none of these citizens your true friend, Cyrnus, for any purpose whatever. Speak to them all in friendly words, but do not associate with them in any serious purpose; for you will learn the character of these miserable fellows, and see that they cannot be trusted in anything. Treachery, deceit, and wiles are what these hopeless creatures love.'
It would be a grave error to read this poem as a document merely of hatred and contempt and not also of the most savage resentment. We must take it in conjunction with the first elegy to see the narrow class-interpretation which Theognis here gives to Solon's doctrine that justice is the basis of all social order. But it would be too much to expect the old master-class, now overthrown, to cling to Solon's ideal of universal justice throughout the state: and even a disinterested observer must acknowledge that the distressed nobleman's appeal to that ideal gives his picture of the city much of the emotional intensity of true poetry. The lofty elegiac style here derives new vigour and vividness from the invective realism which Theognis borrowed from the iambic poets. But his description of the rule of injustice, though partly modelled on Solon's great iambic poem, is perhaps even more strongly influenced by Hesiod's Works and Days: for it was obviously the Hesiodic pattern which led him to construct his book in two main sections held together by a prologue and an epilogue. And his imitation of Hesiod was not confined to the structure of his poem, but arose from the similarity of their spiritual situation and outlook. In the Works and Days Hesiod was prompted to describe the whole moral code of the peasant worker, with its general doctrines as well as their particular applications, by his dispute with his brother Perses about a matter of property-the poem therefore turns on a question of justice. In the same way, Theognis was impelled to expound the morality of the aristocracy by his intellectual hatred for the social revolution. The first section of both works is inspired by a complaint against the distortion of justice, and both poets develop that thought in several long arguments. This striking parallel still holds when we turn to the second part of Theognis' book, which is a collection of brief aphorisms clearly modelled on the second part of the Works and Days. The analogy is not disturbed by the presence, in the latter part of Theognis' work, of several longer pieces which range from three or four couplets to short reflective elegies. In the true archaic manner, both poets were led, by their own personal situation and the needs of the moment, to utter eternally valid truths. And the resulting lack of artistic balance between the two sections of the book is for modern minds counteracted by the gain in personal expression and emotional intensity—so much so in fact that we might easily make the mistake of believing that this free utterance of personal emotion was a universal rule, and of interpreting the whole poem as a personal utterance, whereas it was meant to be a statement of objective truth. [^]
Aristocratic Reaction
The second elegy in the first part of the book sets forth the theme of the collection of moral aphorisms which follows it: the injustice and perfidy of the class which now rules Megara, says Theognis, is due to the fact that it has no standards of what is noble and ignoble. That is the fact which he wishes to impress upon Cyrnus, so that the boy may distinguish himself from the mob by truly noble self-discipline and behaviour. Only he who has tradition possesses these standards. It is now time for that tradition to be preserved for the world by a man who can couch it in immortal phrases: and so it can show the wellbred youth how to become a true nobleman. Theognis warns his pupil not to associate with bad men (nonoi, Selloi) —that is his concrete description of everyone and everything which has not been produced by aristocratic training, as opposed to the nobles who are only found among the peers of Theognis himself. This dichotomy is one of his principal themes: he lays it down as an axiom clearly in the book, when he announces his intention of handing on the ancestral doctrines of his class, and he repeats it later, at the beginning of the collection of aphorisms. Between the description of his purpose and the aphorisms stands the section devoted to politics; it gives the factual ground for Theognis' command. 'Mix with the nobles, do not associate with bad men', by picturing the degradation of those bad men in the darkest colours. His whole teaching exemplifies what he means by mixing with the nobles, for he himself puts on the authority of true nobility to teach his young fellow-noblemen the truth. [^]
The Transvaluation of Friendship
We need not follow the whole course of Theognis' thought through the collected aphorisms of the second half of his book. Every word he writes and every injunction he makes derives its peculiar force and urgency from the imminence of the danger which has been brought home by his description of social conditions in Megara. He begins with a long string of gnomai, maxims warning his pupil against making friends with bad ignoble men, because they are untrustworthy. His advice is to have few friends— men who do not say this to your face and that behind your back, and men on whom you can count in time of trouble. Every revolution produces a violent disturbance of credit and confidence; and men who hold the same political faith are drawn closer to one another, for treachery is spread far and wide. Theognis himself says that 'a trustworthy man is worth much gold at times of political discord.' Is this still the old aristocratic code?
That code had indeed idealized the friendship of Theseus and Pirithous, and of Achilles and Patroclus: and the reverence for a great example such as these is a very old element in aristocratic / education. But now, when the aristocracy has been attacked and has fallen, the old doctrine of the value of good examples and noble friendships is transformed into a party-principle: the friendship of the ancient heroes is now a model for the friendship of members of the same political hetairia. It is impossible to avoid this conclusion from the fact that Theognis begins his teaching by insisting upon the correct choice of friends and on the necessity of well-tested loyalty as the first condition of friendship. Possibly he himself had learnt this from his parents, for the struggles of the aristocracy had lasted for many years. In any case, the social conflict had altered the nature of the old aristocratic moral code: hard times make narrow minds.
Although its origin made that code fundamentally different from the new classless state-morality represented by Solon, the aristocrats were now compelled to consider themselves part and parcel of the state. No doubt they could still regard their class as a secret state within the state, lament its unjust overthrow, and plot for its restoration; but to the dispassionate observer it was only a political party struggling for power and kept from collapse by the innate feeling of class-solidarity. The old injunction to avoid evil communications now changes into a demand for political exclusiveness. This general distortion of the code resulted from the weakness of the nobility; and yet there was much true moral worth in the demand for loyalty (although it was political loyalty to one class which was meant) and for unconditional honesty as the precondition of friendship. That demand is the ultimate expression of political esprit de corps, the spirit which haughtily condemns its enemies thus: 'the new people laugh when they betray one another'. It is not to be compared with the lofty state-ideal of Solon, and yet we cannot deny the earnestness of its chief commandment that the nobleman shall be noble in conduct as well as in birth. Theognis believed that the identification of nobility with noble character was the strength of his class, and its last defence in the struggle for existence.
All Theognis' teaching is coloured by that insistence on carefully chosen friendships. The social revolution had driven him and his class to adopt this protective attitude. But although the aristocracy had developed into a party, we must not regard it as simply a political party. It had merely been compelled to close its ranks and stand on the defensive. Since meanwhile it was in a minority, and had no chance of winning back its supremacy, Theognis cautions his young friend against deliberately accepting existing conditions, and says, 'Walk in the middle of the road, as I do'. By that he does not mean the heroic stand of Solon, exposed to the attacks of both extremes, but a safe and cunning avoidance of any outright offensive or even defensive action. Cyrnus is to play a deep game, to vary his character with his various friends; he is to be like the octopus, which takes the colour of the stone to which it clings, and changes its hue whenever necessary. In fact, Theognis recommends protective mimicry in the struggle for life against the demos. The moral difficulty of the struggle lies in the fact that it must necessarily be a secret one; but Theognis believes that even in such conditions a nobleman will always remain noble. He even holds that the nobleman is 'a citadel and a tower for the emptyheaded commons, although he gets little honour for it'. This code is not a mass of contradictions: it is a necessary consequence of the position of the aristocracy. But it is certainly not the old aristocratic code of ethics. [^]
New Money Threatens Old Aristocracy
One of the most revolutionary changes in that code was the altered conception of areté. This alteration was closely connected with the fundamental cause of the revolution—namely, the redistribution of economic power among the several classes of society. The position of the old aristocracy had been founded on its possession of landed property, and had been gravely shaken by the appearance of money as a new means of exchange. We do not know whether political factors had also affected the situation; but certainly by the time of Theognis the nobility was, at least in part, reduced to poverty, and a new class of rich plebeians was rising to political power and social influence. This economic change was a serious blow to the old aristocratic conception of areté, which had always included the possession of social prestige and the external goods of life, for without them many specific qualities of the nobleman, such as liberality and magnanimity, could not be put into action. Even for simple peasants wealth had meant areté and respect, in Hesiod's words: the phrase shows that the early Greek conception of areté always included a considerable degree of social prominence and influence.
That conception of areté was broken up by the impact of the new city-state morality.Whenever the aristocratic ideal of areté is attacked or altered (particular instances are Tyrtaeus and Solon), we can see how closely it was connected with wealth and how difficult it was for it to survive when the connexion was broken. Tyrtaeus had declared that the areté of the citizen—which, during Sparta's struggles with Messenia, was soldierly courage above all else—was worth more than wealth and all the goods which the noblemen prized; and Solon had said the same of the highest political virtue of the constitutional state, justice. Yet Solon had been nurtured in the old tradition: and he prayed to the gods to send him wealth (righteous wealth, be it said) and founded his hopes of areté and prestige upon the possession of wealth. He did not believe that
unequal distribution of property was contrary to the will of God, for he knew there were other forms of wealth besides gold and land-the natural riches of health and the joy of life. If he had been compelled to choose between areté and wealth, he would have chosen areté.
It is instructive to compare these positive, forward-looking, revolutionary ideas with the weak regrets of Theognis, who never tired of uttering complaints and curses against poverty. He declared that it had an infinite power over men's lives, and he had doubtless known poverty himself. Yet, for all his hatred of being poor, he retained some standards and aspirations higher than mere wealth-standards to which he believed that wealth should be willingly sacrificed. From watching the hateful parvenus of Megara, he found how seldom money and spiritual nobility go together, and he was compelled to acknowledge the worthiness of Solon's preference for righteous poverty. In Theognis' attitude to poverty and riches, we can trace with perfect clarity the transvaluation of the old aristocratic conception of virtue, under the impact of social and economic change: the ideals of Theognis were forcibly altered, while Solon's were born of the freedom of his own spirit. [^]
Spiritual Aristocrats and Noble Blood
Accordingly, Theognis holds that areté is the quality which characterizes the true nobleman when the presence or absence of wealth is left out of account: namely, the very rare quality of spiritual nobility. Some have held that he was incapable of such lofty moral sentiments; but the fact is that his respect for the impoverished aristocracy taught him to moralize in Solon's manner. And there is no real ground for denying him the authorship of the beautiful maxim: 'In justice all virtue is summed up, and every just man is a nobleman.' Though he may have taken over this thought from a commoner like Phocylides, he could not help adopting it as the motto of his own party; for the masses in their struggle for power had borne it on their banner, and then, as Theognis saw, they had trampled it to the ground. Now it became the rallying-cry of the old ruling class: though now unjustly oppressed, they alone had once 'known justice and law' and were still, in Theognis' eyes, the only possessors of true righteousness. No doubt this view limits the scope of the supreme ideal of justice, and makes it the virtue of one party, not a virtue which can be possessed by the whole state. But Theognis would not be repelled by that limitation. Pindar too believed that justice was an essential and inseparable element of aristocratic culture, and in fact its full flower. That belief marked the conquest of the old aristocratic ideal by the new spirit of the city-state.
There was still one barrier to the complete assimilation of that spirit by the nobility--their unshakable belief in the virtues of noble blood. Theognis affirms that their highest duty is to preserve their purity of descent, and bitterly attacks the foolish and disloyal nobles who attempt to prop their fallen fortunes by marrying the daughters of rich commoners, or giving their daughters to the sons of parvenus. 'We select rams and asses and horses which are noble, and try to breed them from good stock: but a nobleman does not hesitate to marry a baseborn woman; wealth confuses breed'. This sharp emphasis on the selective nature of noble birth and training is a sign that the aristocratic code has undergone a change. It is now on the defensive, in the struggle against the levelling power of money and numbers. In Athens, where the whole state had to face and solve great communal problems, the wisest men could not continue to be mere reactionaries, although they were largely aristocrats.
Solon himself had risen above reaction and opposition. But wherever there was a small aristocracy fighting to preserve its existence and its peculiar way of life, it saw its own image in the educational maxims of Theognis. Many of his ideas were revived at a later stage, during the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat; and in the last resort the value of his teaching stands or falls with the existence of an aristocracy, whether it owes its position to its descent or to some other lofty tradition. The essentially aristocratic idea that a race must be preserved by inbreeding and special training was worked out in Sparta above all, and also by the great educational theorists of the fourth century; we shall study it in more detail when we discuss their work. It is enough meanwhile to say that both in Sparta and in the theories of Plato and Aristotle this ideal was extended beyond the limits of one class, and became part of the general Greek ideal that the city-state is the educator of all its citizens. [^]
Part Three
Pindar, the Voice of Aristocracy
When we turn from Theognis to Pindar, we leave the fierce struggles of the nobility in Megara and elsewhere to defend its place in society, and mount to the summit of the calm, proud, inviolate life of early Greek aristocracy. At this height we can forget the problems and conflicts of Theognis' world, and be content to marvel at the power and beauty of that noble and distant ideal. Pindar shows us the Hellenic ideal of an aristocracy of race in the hour of its noblest transfiguration, when, after centuries of glory extending from the mythical past to the hard modernity of the fifth century, the nobility could still draw the gaze of all Greece upon its exploits at the games of Olympia and Pytho, Nemea and the Corinthian Isthmus, and could still transcend all regional or racial dissidences in the universal admiration of its triumphs. It is this aspect of Greek aristocracy that we must study if we are to see that the part it played in the shaping of the Greek character was more than the jealous preservation of inherited class-privilege and class-prejudice, and the cultivation of a relentlessly intensified code of ethics based on property. It was the true creator of the lofty ideal of humanity which is manifest to this day-though more often admired than understood—in the Greek sculptures of the archaic and classical periods. The athlete whom these works portray in the harmonious strength and nobility of this utmost perfection lives, feels, and speaks for us again in Pindar's poetry, and through his spiritual energy and religious gravity still affects us with the strange power which is given only to the unique and irrecoverable achievements of the human spirit.For it was a uniquely precious moment when the God-intoxicated but human world of Greece saw the height of divinity in the human body and soul raised to a perfection high above earthly powers, and when in those gods in human shape the effort of man to copy that divine model through which artists had realized the law of perfection, unattainable but imperious, found its purpose and its happiness.
Pindar's poetry, though archaic, is archaic in a different sense from the works of his contemporaries and even of his predecessors. Compared with it, Solon's iambics seem thoroughly modern in language and feeling. Pindar's variety, his plenitude, his logical difficulty are only the outward and, as it were, modern guise of his deep-seated sense of the past—a love of antiquity which was rooted in the severe austerity of his nature and the remoteness of his actual life. To pass from the 'older' civilization of Ionia to Pindar is like leaving the direct line of development which runs from the Homeric poems to the personal lyrics and the natural philosophy of the Ionians, and entering a different world. Although Hesiod was a faithful student of Homer and of Ionian ideas, the reader of Hesiod is often astonished by sudden glimpses into the dark prehistory of mainland Greece, buried far beneath the foundations of the epic. Much more so, when we open Pindar, we are at once in a world unknown to the Ionia of Hecataeus and Heraclitus, a world which is in many ways older than Homer and Homer's characters, lit as they are by the first brilliance of Ionian thought. For although Pindar's faith in the mission of the nobility has much in common with Homer, Homer takes it lightly, almost gaily, while the younger poet speaks of it in deadly earnest. This is partly brought about by the difference of purpose between epic and the Pindaric hymn: the latter gives a solemn religious injunction, while the former relates and adorns. Still, the grave severity of Pindar is not simply dictated by the form and external purpose of his poems: it springs from his deeply-felt kinship with and reverence for the aristocracy of which he writes. It is because his own nature is essentially aristocratic by birth and nurture that he can give the aristocratic ideal the compelling force which we call Pindaric. [^]
Pindar Gave New Life & Authority to the Old Aristocratic Code
For the religious meaning of the athletic contest was embodied in all his songs for the victors at the four great games; and the religious life of the nobility reached a culminating point in the incomparable energy and ambition of the contest.(206)
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Pindar's hymns were written to celebrate the greatest moment in the athlete's life, his victory at one of the great games. Victory was the precondition of the poem, for it was usually sung by a chorus of the victor's young fellow-citizens at or shortly after his triumphant return. In Pindar, the close connexion between the hymn of victory and its external occasion had a religious significance comparable to the connexion between worship and art in the hymns to the gods.
And there was a further development towards the end of the sixth century, which proved the increasing interest in individual personality even in Greece proper: the hymnal form was transferred from the service of the gods to the glorification of men, so that a human being became the subject of a hymn. Such exaltation was of course impossible except for men of semi-divine majesty, such as Olympic victors. (208)
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Pindar was the first to make the triumphal hymn a sort of religious poem. Inspired by the old aristocratic conception of the athletic contest, he gave a definite moral and religious significance to the spectacle of men struggling to bring their manhood to perfection in victory; and thereby he created a new type of lyric, which rose from a far greater depth of emotion and ex-perience, and which seemed to look down from a sunny and triumphant peak upon the mysteries and struggles of man's destiny. ) Severe, difficult, and devoutly religious as his poems are, they still live and move with an incomparable freedom. It was only in that religious form that Pindar could admit the possibility of a hymn to a human victor. By transmuting the hymnal form in this way, he had taken it over from its proud inventors, and made it his own: his justification was his lofty conviction that he alone knew the true meaning of the noble subject with which it dealt. By his use of the triumphal hymn he was enabled to give a new authority to the old aristocratic code, even in an age which viewed it with little sympathy; and at the same time the new lyric now at last attained its 'real nature' by being thus animated with the true aristocratic faith. He never felt that, while he hymned the athlete's victory, he was somehow dependent on the athlete-that would have been dishonour to the art of poetry; nor did he play the artisan and create to suit the wishes of his subject. On the other hand, he never condescended. He always stood on the same plane as the victor whose triumph he cele-brated, be he a king, a nobleman, or a simple citizen. In his eyes, the poet and the victor belonged to each other. That view of the relationship was his own, and was strange to the Greeks of his time, but it was a rebirth of the old, the original function of the bard—to proclaim the glory of great deeds.
(So he restored to poetry the heroic spirit which was its earliest inspiration: he made it more than a simple record of events or a decorative expression of personal emotion, for he made it once more into praise of the prowess which is a pattern for pos-terity.? Yet the fact that his poems were each dictated by a purely external, apparently casual occasion was his greatest
strength: for it was victory which always demanded the song. The foundation of his poetry was this concentration upon a permanent standard.)
It would be truer to say that, through his work, the heroic spirit and the praise of heroism which were the inspiration of the epic are reborn in lyrie form. There could be no greater contrast to the free expression of personal feeling in Ionian and Aeolic poetry from Archilochus to Sappho than Pindar's subordination of his poetry to a religious and social ideal, and his complete, almost priestly self-dedication to the service of the last survival of ancient chivalry.
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He believes that victory is the manifestation of the highest human areta, and it is that belief which dictates the form of his poems. [^]
Pindar Helped Foster a New Panhellenic Arete
(The evidence of Simonides is vitally important in explaining the interesting process by which the idea that man, with all his acts, is wholly or partially dependent on destiny—an idea which had been developing in complexity and significance in Ionian lyric poetry since Archilochus-entered the old aristocratic code of morality. For Simonides, like Pindar, was bound to represent the old tradition in his hymns of victory. What makes him particularly interesting is that several very different currents of tradition meet in his work. He stands, for example, in the direct line of Ionian, and Aeolian, and Dorian ways of life: he is the typical representative of the new Panhellenic culture which arose about the end of the sixth century, and he is an invaluable witness to the development of the Greek idea of areté. [^]
Pindar's Educational Message
Since Pindar conceives of areta as an aristocratic quality, he believes it to be bound up with the great deeds of heroes of the past. He always sees the victor as the worthy heir to the proud traditions of his family, and honours the great ancestors who have bequeathed some of their glory to him. Yet he does not depreciate the achievement of the victor of today. Areta is divine because a god or a demigod was the first ancestor of a family which possesses it: the power descends from him, and is constantly renewed in each succeeding generation. Thus Pindar cannot consider a victor purely as an individual, since his victory was won through his divine blood. Accordingly, almost all his praise of a hero's deeds passes over into praise of the hero's descent. Praise of the victor's ancestors is a regular element in his hymns of victory: through it, the victor joins the divine company of gods and heroes. The second Olympian hymn opens:
'What god, what hero, what man shall we noise abroad? And beside Zeus, to whom Olympia is sacred, and Heracles, who founded the games, it sets Theron, the ruler of Acragas, winner of the four-horse-chariot race, upholder of his city, flower of an honoured line.' Of course it is not always possible to speak of the good deeds and happy fortunes of a victor's family; and the depth of Pindar's religious feeling and the freedom of his spirit are seen at their noblest when he mentions the shadow of divinely sent suffering which falls on high virtue. Who lives and acts, must suffer.'That is Pindar's faith: it is the faith of Greece. Action in this sense is confined to the great, for only they can be fully said to act and suffer. Thus, says Pindar, time brought wealth and honour to the family of Theron and his father, as a reward for their native virtues, but time also involved it in guilt and suffering. 'Not even Time can undo what has been done, but forgetfulness may be brought by a favouring spirit. For malignant suffering dies mastered by noble joy, when God's fate lifts rich fortune on high.' Infact, the aristocratic system depends on the constant succession of distinguished men. The failure of that crop, in one or more generations of a family, is an idea which was never hard for Greek minds to grasp.
Thus Pindar, constantly recurring to the ancestors of the victor whom he celebrates— and the ancestors of a family in Greece proper were not only remembered, but were actually present in their honoured tombs-forms an entire philosophy, rich with deep meditations on the merit, the happiness, and the suffering of different generations within one rich, brilliant, and noble family. The histories of the great houses of Greece would furnish copious examples of the splendour and decline of great tradition. But Pindar's interest in it was chiefly centred upon the educational power of great examples. Since Homer, one of the very foundations of aristocratic education had been glorification of the past and of great heroes long dead. If the praise of areta is principally the work of the poet, then he is an educator in the highest sense. Pindar accepted this mission with a deep religious comprehension of his duty and his powers: and therein he differed from the impersonal Homeric bards. His heroes were men who lived and struggled in the immediate present, but he set them in the world of the myth. That is, he set them in the world of ideal heroes, whose heroism became a pattern for posterity to follow; invested by the brilliance of that world, they were to be kindled by its glory to exert their highest powers and thereby to reach the same pinnacle of achievement. This purpose gives Pindar's use of myths its peculiar value. He considered blame--which the great Archilochus had used in his poems--to be ignoble. His detractors are said to have informed King Hieron of Syracuse that Pindar had disparaged him. In the dedicatory section of his second Pythian ode, Pindar, conscious of the debt of gratitude he owes to the king, refutes the charge. But although he will not desist from praising Hieron, he shows him a pattern to imitate: for he holds that by listening to scandalous
gossip he has not shown himself at his best. He cannot aspire to be higher than he is; but he should allow the poet to show him his true self, and below that he must not sink. In this passage Pindar's use of the ideal pattern reaches its greatest sublimity. The sentence 'Become what you are' seems to sum up his whole educational message. That is the meaning of all the traditional models which he holds up to mankind: men must see in them their own true selves, raised to a higher plane. Once more we see the deep social and spiritual kinship of this aristocratic ideal of paideia with the educational spirit of Plato's philosophy of ideas.
That philosophy is rooted in the aristocratic system of education, and is fundamentally alien to all the Ionian natural philosophies with which historians of philosophy almost invariably connect it. Strange, that in the introductions to standard editions of Plato Pindar is never mentioned; while the hylozoists' primal elements—air, fire, water, and so on--appear and reappear in every successive edition with the persistency of an endemic disease. He lives and works in a world in which the myth is more real than any reality; and whether he is glorifying the old nobility or parvenu tyrants and fatherless bourgeois, he raises them all to the same pinnacle of half-divine glory by the magical touch of his deeper knowledge, his realization of the higher meaning of their life and their struggle. [^]
Blood or Spirit?
In Chiron, the wise centaur who teaches the young heroes, Pindar finds the mythical pattern for his own educational mission. We find it elsewhere too--for instance in the third Nemean, which is so rich in educational examples. In that poem, he evokes the ancestors of the Aeginetan victor Aristocleides to be the models for great prowess. They are Peleus, Telamon, and Achilles. The poet's mind turns from Achilles to the cave of Chiron where he was brought up. But when men believe that areta lies in the blood of a noble family, can they also believe that education is possible? Pindar recurs to this question several times. It had been posed, in essence, as early as Homer, for in the ninth book of the Iliad Achilles is confronted at the crisis by his teacher Phoenix; and Phoenix's admonitory speech falls unheard on the hardened heart of Achilles. There, however, the problem is whether inborn character will respond to guidance.
Pindar is concerned with the modern question, whether the true virtue of man can be learnt, or only inherited by blood. A question of the same type recurs again and again in Plato; but Pindar was the first to formulate it, for it was thrust on him by the conflict of the aristocratic educational tradition with the new rational spirit. And throughout his work it is plain that he has thought long and deeply on it. He gives his answer in the third Nemean ode:Through inborn glory a man is very mighty; but he who learns from teaching is a twilight man, wavering in spirit, never stepping forth on firm foot, but lipping a myriad virtues with imperfect spirit.' No Achilles astonished Chiron by showing his inborn heroism before he had been taught. So says the saga, and according to Pindar it knows all. Therefore the saga gave the right answer to the question. Education cannot act unless there is inborn areta for it to act upon, as there was in Chiron's glorious pupils, Achilles, Jason, and Asklepios, whom he 'fostered, strengthening their hearts in all seemly matters.' That pregnant phrase contains the fruits of long thought on the problem. It shows the deliberate resolve of the aristocracy to preserve its position at a time of crisis. [^]