Circa 518-Circa 438 B.C.E.
Lyric Poet

Court Favorite. Pindar is the most famous and easily the best-preserved of the lyric poets of Greece. He was of Theban aristocratic birth, connected to important families throughout the Greek world, and wrote poetry for a wide range of royal patrons, from Macedon to Cyrene and Sicily. In 476 B.C.E. he joined the court of Hieron of Syracuse shortly after that tyrant had taken power. The dates of most of his surviving works ranging from 498 to 446 B.C.E., can be fixed exactly as they celebrate sporting victories which were well known and sometimes form the basis of ancient chronology (as in the dating by Olympiads). Nevertheless, the detailed information offered by the ancient biographical tradition is not likely to be correspondingly accurate. In particular, modern scholars have questioned whether the first-person statements in the surviving odes (where the...