We know very little of Pindar's life. He was born in or about the year
B.C. 522, at the village of Kynoskephalai near Thebes. He was thus a
citizen of Thebes and seems to have always had his home there. But he
travelled among other states, many of which have been glorified by his
art. For his praise of Athens, 'bulwark of Hellas,' the city which at
Artemision 'laid the foundation of freedom,' the Thebans are said to
have fined him; but the generous Athenians paid the fine, made him
their Proxenos, and erected his statue at the public cost. For the
magnificent Sicilian princes, Hieron of Syracuse and Theron of
Akragas, not unlike the Medici in the position they held, Pindar wrote
five of the longest of his extant odes, and probably visited them in
Sicily. But he would not quit his home to be an ornament of their
courts. When asked why he did not, like Simonides, accept the
invitations of these potentates to make his home with them, he
answered that he had chosen to live his own life, and not to be the
property of another. He died at the age of 79, that is, probably, in
the year 443, twelve years before the Peloponnesian war began. Legend
said that he died in the theatre of Argos, in the arms of Theoxenos,
the boy in whose honour he wrote a Skolion of which an immortal
fragment remains to us. Other myths gathered round his name. It was
said that once when in childhood he had fallen asleep by the way 'a
bee had settled on his lips and gathered honey,' and again that
'he saw in a dream that his mouth was filled with honey and the
honeycomb;' that Pan himself learnt a poem of his and rejoiced to sing
it on the mountains; that finally, while he awaited an answer from
the oracle of Ammon, whence he had enquired what was best for man,
Persephone appeared to him in his sleep and said that she only of the
gods had had no hymn from him, but that he should make her one shortly
when he had come to her; and that he died within ten days of the
vision.
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