Talk:Pindar
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I don't think "extracted and wikified from a certain encyclopedia" counts as crediting sources - Jim Regan 03:08, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Why did 61.29.106.146 delete half the article? Was there are reason, or was it just vandalism? Bacchiad 05:03, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
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- A vandal added: PS: Pindar had a hott penis i touched it once upon a time.
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- It's true, and I wish. Bacchiad 18:09, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
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Does anyone else get 15 not 17 when they add up all the books? Is there a reason for this or is it just poor arithmetic? --Colmfinito 17:33, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
- I have corrected this based on the figures in M.M. Willcock, Pindar: Victory Odes (Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 3. Wareh 21:19, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
The opening paragraph gets the article off to a pretty poor start, with the pride of place to which it gives an apocryphal and sentimental-to-melodramatic biographical perspective. An ambitious contributor who wanted to replace this with an introduction to Pindar in his cultural context as we can actually understand it would do well to draw from the introduction to Frank Nisetich's Pindar's Victory Songs (Johns Hopkins University Press). Wareh 21:08, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Article needs replacing
The present article on Pindar reflects ignorance of the primary sources and at best a certain naivete about the scholarly literature. Any uninformed reader who comes here in search of basic, reliable information will be misled. The author repeats ancient tall tales that no serious person believes. He claims certain things are "now believed" to be the case, as if reporting a scholarly consensus, when in fact one scholar has now argued that they are the case. He doesn't give a clue about what's interesting or essential about Pindar. He is ungrammatical. In short, somebody should just delete this while making a silly face.
I'll come back and fix it myself when I get time.
In the meantime, my nominee for a decent starting point for a general article on Pindar's life and the context and content of his poems would be the introductory matter in W.H. Race's two-volume translation of 1997 in the Loeb Classical Library series. Like most scholars of ancient Greek literature, Race properly gives all ancient anecdotes about Pindar the status of made-up unless and until we have reason to take them seriously. Race explains succinctly the Rube Goldberg reasoning behind what people go around citing as fact about Pindar, such as his life dates. It's not as though you can go down to the Theban city hall and look it all up. Not all but nearly all ancient dates are inferences from data that is questionable to start with. The best you can say for various sets of life dates that are commonly given for Pindar is that they might as well be right, as long as they allow Pindar to be old enough to compose poems in 498 BC and not dead yet in 446 BC. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mstarli (talk • contribs) .
- "The author" is the 1911 Britannica, for the most part. I don't like the article either, but it's a decent reflection of the scholarly consensus of the early 20th century. So, your criticisms apply not only to this article, but most scholarship on Pindar. Not that you're wrong--Pindar scholarship before Bundy's work in the late '60s was a mess. Your suggestion to start with Race's introduction is a good one, I think. Another source on the unreliability of ancient biographical traditions in Mary Lefkowitz's Lives of the Greek Poets (her First-Person Fictions might also be a good source for this article). --Akhilleus (talk) 06:16, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
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- I don't know much about Pindar myself, but I was wondering how one is objectively the greatest poet? If I prefered one of the other nine poets, what would happen?!??! - Kyle543 19:37, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
- No one would notice. --Wetman 03:04, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Naively literal
"Pindar is to be conceived, then, as standing within the circle of those families for whom the heroic myths were domestic records." A sense of aristocratic flattery and courtly propaganda is missing from this impossiblly opaquee assertion, rather typical of the article as a whole, which is very much as if written by the Wikipedian just above. How can a sensible adult assessment of Pindar be arrived at: every commonplace will be tagged "original research" or "POV" by those who have never read a word of Pindar in translation or given the subject a moment's thought. How could an adult get a word in edgewise? --Wetman 03:04, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] rhymes in english !
elsewhere in wikipedia (see Antikythera Mechanism) the following appears :-
Pindar, one of the nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, said this of Rhodes in his seventh Olympic Ode:
"The animated figures stand Adorning every public street And seem to breathe in stone, or move their marble feet."
Why does this rhyme in English ...street ...feet? Surely he spoke Greek
--83.105.33.91 12:48, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
I now remember the description by Greek poet Simonides of Ceos in 480 B.C of the Spartans defeat by the Persians thus:-
tell it in Sparta thou that passes by
here, faithfull to her charge, her soldiers lie
again, it rhymes in english but english did not even exist at all then
--83.105.33.91 11:32, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
