The victory odes of Pindar

[Part 3]

In my last two columns I ventured to examine the nature and significance of Pindar's victory odes - a cultural world far removed from us - and the way they related to the complex integrity and cultural compact of Hellenistic society. In today's column, I wish to highlight the salience of these odes as carefully constructed verbal artifacts, and how they can be productively approached using some of the protocols favoured by deconstructive critics. In the latter half of the column, it is my intention to compare these victory odes with panegyrics and war poems found in the Sinhala and Tamil poetic traditions.

As we saw earlier, Pindar's victory odes deal with issues of individual and community, human and divine worlds, power and glory, morality and wisdom in relation to specific events. He has constructed many-sided verbal artifacts out of these themes and ambitions; into his literary fabric are woven issues of politics, morality, aesthetics, history and metaphysics in admirable ways. In his odes, we observe an interesting interplay of the oral and the verbal performances.

These are carefully composed lyrics that are to be sung by trained singers on chosen occasions in public. Hence the idea of performance is central to a proper understanding of these poems. These odes appear to be improvisations when in point of fact they are not. This appearance of spontaneity conceals the traces of a carefully practiced craft.

We shall set golden pillars

Under the chamber’s well-made porch

And build, as it were, a marvelous hall;

When work it begun,

The front must be made to shine afar.

What we witness here is the immediacy of oral presentation combined with careful and patient literary artistry.

What I would like to now is to examine these victory odes as complex verbal artifacts displaying within them the warring significations characteristic of any literary text. A distinctive feature of these odes by Pindar is that the ambiguity that marks the representation of the protagonist that referred to earlier is reflected in the ambiguities of the literary text. In other words the text becomes an allegory of its own privileged object of celebration. Pindar in Python 4 says

When the king heard them, himself came forth to them,

The son of tyro, lovely-haired queen;

And Jason with soft voice, let smooth words fall,

Laying a foundation of wise speech;

The protagonist’s deployment of ambiguous words is indicative of the poet’s use of ambiguous words.

In examining the verbal texture and the textual dynamics of the odes by Pindar, I wish to focus on eleven binaries. The first is that between truth and textuality. This is indeed a central conceptual underpinning of deconstructive thinking. Deconstructionists would argue that a poem is invariably fissured and divided against itself. On the one hand he is keen to demonstrate the ability of poetry to uncover truth and establish the superiority of divine authority.

On the other hand, Pindar repeatedly demonstrates the fact that this is achieved trough the complex processes of textual production, the energies expended in creating verbal artifice; without the support of the conscious literary craft of the poet, he cannot penetrate the truth.

The second is the interplay of unifying and divisive forces that characterize these victory odes. For example in Pythian 4

Now sails. - but now, he cries,

He has done with foul illness at last, and he sees home.

Near Apollo fountain

He shall lie, at the feast, and yield his heart to youth iiiiOften and painting his pained harp

These unifying and divisive forces are combined with the outward travel and return. The unsettled life of traveling in the wider world and settled life of the home are contrasted effectively in this ode. The interplay of the impulses of expansionism and rootedness are crucial to the meaning of this poem.

Third, the duality of mortality and immortality is important. This duality animates many of Pindar's victory odes. For classical Greek writers the mortality of human beings is a fact that has to be constantly engaged; the mortality of human beings is constantly contrasted with the immortality of the gods who are seen as 'deathless and ageless for ever.' Pindar makes use of this conventional understanding of human beings and gods as a way of enforcing his theme of the commerce between mortality and immortality, the ephemeral and the permanent. Interestingly, this interplay of mortality and immortality sheds light on poetic production; the poet seeks to create a permanent, an immortal work of literary at through fleeting emotions and events. This touches on the earlier binary that I alluded to between truth and artifice.

Art of poetry

Fourth the binary of poetry and the cosmos is important. In many of his odes Pindar seeks to establish a connection between the art of poetry and the maintenance of the cosmos (cosmos originally signified order.) The power of poetry to confer immortality, in the mind of Pindar, is important in this conjunction. As we discussed earlier, this binary is closely linked to the idea of glory that was so fundamental and foundational to Pindar's thinking. Fifth, the interplay between the hope for success and the recognition of uncertainty and the space for failure is significant. On the one hand, the triumph of the victor underlines joy, power, stability while the possibility of failure and the darker events that could ensue are not far from the rim of imagination. For example in Olympian 2 he says

A transcendent star, the truest light for a man.

If any man has it, and knows what shall come,

That of those who die here

The lawless souls at once pay penalty.

Here one observes the sharp juxtaposition of triumph with the inevitability of a future death.

Sixth, one can detect in Pindar's victory odes a tussle between truth and falsehood. What he is dealing with is truth and commemoration of real events. At the same rime, he is doing this through the instrumentalities of literary art which stress artifice and make-believe. Indeed, this is a dualism that runs through many of Pindar's odes. Seventh, we can find in his odes a contested dialogue between historicity and timelessness. The events and people he celebrates are historical; the imaginings and wisdom that they produce are timeless.

Eight, in Pidar's odes there is a creative tension between the world as it exists and the created world of the odes. This is related to the whole question of the poet's craft. As Charles Segal who has written so perceptively on Pindar's odes remarks, 'The poet has the power to impose his coherence upon the world, to remake reality in accordance with his own vision. But in doing so he is also forced to confront the artificiality of what he constructs. This is the artifice of superimposing the order of literary discourse upon the non-order of life.' Ninth, in Pindar's odes there is a remarkable contestation for supremacy between the human and the divine. These odes dealt with human efforts; but the moral yardstick with which they were measured was decidedly divine. This clash between the human and the divine assumes a further level of complexity when we realize that they are connected to Earth. As the passage signals, they both draw breath from the same mother Earth. This is the opening stanza of Nemean 6.

Single is the race, single

Of men and the gods;

From a single mother we both draw breath.

But a difference of power in everything

Keeps us apart;

For the one is as nothing, but the brazen sky

Strays a fixed habitation for ever

Yet we can in greatness of mind

Or of body be like the immortals,

Tho' we know not to what goal

By day or in the nights

Fate has written that we shall run.

Personal voice

Tenth, a binary that deserves particular attention is the personal voice and the collective voice. Pinadar's victory meant to be sung and danced by a choir; what this means is that the odes are uttered by a collective voice. At the same time, Pindar also seeks to recover a personal voice that can carry the inflections of his own distinctive thinking and vision.

The interplay of these two voices gives these victory odes an invigorating power. Eleven, there is a creative tension between the hero whose deeds are celebrated and the talents of the poet who is celebrating them. At times, critics referred to Pindar as a hired praiser, a professional flatterer. But this ignores the indubitably powerful poetry that he consistently produced. At one level, the poet is submissively recounting the triumphs of the protagonist; at another level, he is acting as a rival of the hero who seeks to achieve his own triumph by subduing the words for his own chosen ends.

I have in the interest of space somewhat schematically pointed out eleven intersecting conflicts that mark Pindar's victory odes. All these contestations, taken together, open the door for a productive deconstructive reading of these odes. That indeed has been one of my aims. Pindar may have composed his poems some twenty five centuries ago; but they can be explored and assessed using the latest modes of literary analysis.

It is against this backdrop of thinking that I now wish to focus in some heroic poetry written in Sinhala and Tamil. In the Sinhala poetic tradition there is a genre of poetry referred to as 'prashshthi' and hatan kavi. These are poems of praise, heroic poetry that celebrated victorious kings and events.

Sound effects

The most outstanding among them is the Parakumba Siritha. As a work of conscious literary art, it falls far short of the mark established by such poems as Kavsilumina. Guttilaya, Kavyashekraya and Salalihini Sandeshaya. However, the author of this poem displays certain skills in exploiting sound effects to heighten the verbal music produced by the poem.

The panegyrics and war poems in Sinhala share many features in common. Both seek to celebrate a triumph in battle and convey the heartfelt thanks of a grateful nation. A panegyric like the Parakumba Siritha tends to pay greater attention to ornamentation, while the war poems, although lesser accomplishments in literary terms focus more on an identifiable narrative. The war poems focus on a single battle, while others on more than one. In both sub-genres the focus is on a triumphant protagonist.

The hatan kavi gained wide circulation in the 17th century, among the Sinhala war poems are Kustahthinu Hatana, Parangi Hatana, Ingreesi Hatana, Maha Hatana and a whole host of imitations.

It is important to bear in mind the fact that the celebration of kings in battle is found in any of the classical Sinhala poems dating from the earliest times. Even in the Sandesha kavyas such as Mayura Sandeshya and Gira Sandeshaya there are celebrations of kings and nobles. In terms of elegance of expression these descriptions are of a higher order than the war poems. However, in the Sandesha kavya;s celebrating victorious heroes is of ancillary interest while in the war poems it is their primary objective.

There are interesting similarities between Pindar's victory odes that I discussed earlier and the war poems in Sinhala. While both groups focus on a battle or a contestation, Pindar's odes are focused on the effects of the action than the action itself. The Sinhala war poems highlight the action itself. In a poem like the Kusthantheenu Hatana there are graphic descriptions of battle-field scenes. An interesting point of similarity between both groups is the invocation of an ancestry presented in a heightened tone. Pindar focused on the family connections of the victors while in the war poems one observes an attempt to trace out a distant and glorious lineage in the case of the Parakumba Sitirtha, it goes far back as the beginning - the maha sammatha. Another point of similarity is that actual historical events form the basis of both Pindar's victory odes and Sinhala war poems.

In terms of conscious literary art, elegance of expression and orchestration of emotion the victory odes are far superior; in comparison with the Sinhala war poems they are far more compact compositions. These two sets of poetical texts also display the specificities of the culture from which they emerge.

Tamil poetry

Let us now examine some comparable Tamil poetry. Here I wish to focus on the ancient Tamil poem Purananuru that I alluded to earlier. This is an anthology 400 poems written between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D.

This anthology consists of love poems dealing with a variety of subjective emotions as well the activities of kings, and their successes in the battlefields I wish to focus on a few poems that deal with kings as a way of creating a space in which Pindar's victory odes could be examine from a comparative optic. Many of the poems gathered in this anthology are prescriptive in that it suggests the norms that a king should adhere to and the way he should conduct himself. His relationship to his subjects as well as the important royal attributes such as valor, strength, generosity and kindness are frequently stressed.

Many of the poems collected in the Purananaru make the point that the world is inherently chaotic, disorderly and it is indeed the duty of a king to impose order and establish a harmonious society. Here one observes a close parallel with the dominant sentiments expressed in Pindar's victory odes which also emphasize the importance of order as a way of eliminating chaos. Very often the physical activities associated with battle are made to find reflections in the world of nature.

Destroying the land, your limitless army advances

With its swift horses peerless in battle,

And it spreads on its shield like so many clouds,

Moving forward, destroying the vanguard,

Ravaging the rich fields, bathing elephants

In the waters of the reservoirs that ha been guarded.

Some poems, as with Pindar's victory odes, are addressed to the victors celebrating their bravery and strength.

You are of a lineage of strong men without equal

Who through their efforts seized and ruled by themselves

The expanse of the broad earth wholly encircled

By the roaring waters and so established their fame.

The sense of ancestry, of lineage is important for the poets featured in the Purananuru as well as for Pindar in his odes. These poems are also marked by a penchant for hyperbole which is intimately linked to the effects that the poet is seeking to achieve

Even if the depths of the vast waters

And the expanse of the immense earth,

The directions traveled by the wind,

Or space that lies empty, even if these

Could be measured, you would remain beyond measure

For your knowledge, your kindness, and your great compassion

Many of these poems glitter with bright images that both organize the flow if emotion and draw attention to themselves as in poems such as the following.

It was as if the terrifying sun, which is swollen

With virulent anger and never abandon its usual course

As it soars up to disperse the darkness spread through the sky

Glittering with stars, and the moon with its soft light

Both fell to earth when you fought against them and they died

On the battlefield where pain is endured - those two kings

Of great, intractable force who had sworn an oath

The celebration of the triumphant kings is the foundational motive in many of the poems contained in this anthology. This is indeed a feature in Pindar's poems as well as we saw earlier. However, the tropes in the two sets of poems grow out of distinctively different cultural soils. The following passage bears testimony to this fact.

Endless in your charity, death-dealing in battle, our leader

Greatness your elephant is like a mountain your army resounds

Like the ocean your spear with its sharp blade shines

Like lightning you are strong enough to make the earth tremble

Complex orchestration

Scholars of classical Tamil poetry have commented on the complex orchestration of thought, emotion and imagery that one finds in Tamil poems. This gives rise to a musicality that is secured not only through sound effects but also by acts internal balance and harmony. This is indeed a feature that is vividly present in Pindar's victory odes as well another interesting feature in both sets f verses is the articulation of the idea that truth has to be understood as a basically mythical construct and that it is vitally linked to the immortality of gods.

While the poets displayed in the Purananuru also subscribe to the notion of a transcendental truth it is achieved not by the commerce between the human and divine world as is the case in Pindar, but through the galvanization of the natural world.

The interplay between the oral and written traditions is important for both Pindar's odes and classical Tamil poetry. As I indicated earlier intersection of the oral and written forms gives Pindar's poems a special vibrancy.

In ancient Tamil heroic poetry too this interplay figures prominently. While scholars such as K.Kailasapathy end to emphasize the orality, others like George Hart seem to accord less importance to it. As I stated earlier, a tension that is clearly present in Pindar's victory odes is that between truth and artifice.

He is keen to present the truth; t the same time, he is fully aware of the dangers that await a poet who is given to praising of his chosen victors. After all, this what he does in his odes However, unlike most other poets, he is acutely aware of the danger that he could yield to falsehood and deception in his praise of his victors.

In his victory odes, Pindar was able to enforce an enabling connection between the triumphs of his victors in athletic contests and his exercises in poetic composition which were battles with language. Moreover, he sought to find parallels between the art of poetry and the birth of the universe within the parameters of a Greek world view. He was able to weave the twin veins of terrestrial and celestial imaginations into elaborate elegies.

These efforts, I submit, give added weight to his poetry. Pindar wrote at a time when the attainments of Greek culture were at full flow; but he was able to impress it with his singular and enduring talent.

In my series of columns on Pindar's odes I tried to open up a cultural world that is distant and remote from us, but in a curious way one that is also close to us in certain respects.