(N.B. This entry complements the previous one, titled “Hybris over What Is: On Aeschylus.”)
Heraclitus (fl. 504–501 BCE), Pindar (c. 518–438), and Parmenides (fl. 475) were roughly contemporary with one another; and with Aeschylus (c. 525–455). Pindar is commonly considered to be a poet, Aeschylus a tragedian, and Heraclitus and Parmenides philosophers. But this is an anachronistic division. Heraclitus wrote aphorisms whose form is as important as their content is. In contrast to Sophocles and, especially, Euripides, Aeschylus’s metaphysical depth is extraordinary. While of Parmenides only extensive fragments of a poem are extant. As for Pindar, his poetry mirrors Heraclitus’s philosophy and anticipates Parmenides’s. To realise this latter point, however, it is fundamental to bear in mind that Pindar’s “abstract concepts operate as complex images, and images take on conceptual functions.”(⦼)
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Let’s begin with Heraclitus. Fränkel and Hubbard already observed some lexical and rhetorical connections between them.(⊛)
Consider, moreover, Heraclitus’s fragment:
ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάντατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες
immortal mortals, mortal immortals: [these (= the immortals)] living their death [= that of the mortals], [those (= the mortals)] dying their life [= that of the immortals]. (DK B62, our translation)
Perceptibly, the structure of this fragment, whose content we have briefly examined elsewhere, is that of a double chiasm or double mirror:
Pindar, on his part, writes – in Anthony Verity’s translation:
ἓν ἀνδρῶν, ἓν θεῶν γένος· ἐκ μιᾶς δὲ πνέομεν / ματρὸς ἀμφότεροι· διείργει δὲ πᾶσα κεκριμένα / δύναμις, ὡς τὸ μὲν οὐδέν, ὁ δὲ χάλκεος ἀσφαλὲς αἰὲν ἕδος / μένει οὐρανός. ἀλλά τι προσφέρομεν ἔμπαν ἢ μέγαν / νόον ἤτοι φύσιν ἀθανάτοις, / καίπερ ἐφαμερίαν οὐκ εἰδότες οὐδὲ μετὰ νύκτας ἄμμε πότμος / οἵαν τιν᾽ ἔγραψε δραμεῖν ποτὶ στάθμαν.
There is one race of men, and one of gods, / though from one mother we both draw our breath. / A division of power keeps us entirely separate: / the one is nothing, the other has an eternal home in the secure brazen heaven. / Even so, we resemble the immortals in some respects, / in greatness of mind or of stature, / though we do not know by day or night / what finishing line destiny has marked out for us to run towards. (Nemean 6.1-7)(⦿)
We would rather translate:
One is the race of men and gods: / from one mother we both draw our breath.(⧀) / But our different powers set us aside, / for we are nothing, while the bronzed heaven remains ever secure in place. / And yet in something we come close to the immortals, / to wit, in the greatness of our thought and in our shining forth; / although we ignore by day or night which is our lot, / what finishing line we are running towards. (Nemean 6.1-7)(⦿)
Therefore, the structure of these verses, which form the first strophe of Pindar’s 6th Nemeanode, and which like Heraclitus’s frag. B62, focus on the relation between mortals and immortals, is, by way of contrast with the latter, that of a double zigzag (Fränkel: “pendulum”)(⧁):
regardless of how one interprets the opening verses:
i / (a) “one is the race of men and gods, as one is our mother…,” (b) “but our different power separates us…,” (a’) “and yet in something we come close to the immortals…” (b’) “although we ignore…,” etc.; or else
ii / (b) “one is the race of men and another one the race of the gods,” (a) “though one is our mother…,” for (b’) “our different power separates us…,” (a’) “although in something we resemble the immortals…,” (b’’) “even if we ignore…,” etc.
In other words, Pindar develops not only the same motif found in Heraclitus, but gives it a similar, while not exactly identical, rhythm: a double movement, like in Heraclitus, which presents, though, the form of a double zigzag rather than, as in Heraclitus, the form of a double mirror. Notice, also, that, again like in Heraclitus, the second segment (a’ + b’) reflects the first one (a + b), and vice versa.
Moreover, Pindar writes elsewhere – in Verity’s translation:
ἐπάμεροι· τί δέ τις; τί δ᾽ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ / ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ, / λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπεστιν ἀνδρῶν καὶ μείλιχος αἰών.
Creatures of a day! What is man? What is he not? / He is the dream of a shadow; yet when Zeus-sent brightness comes / a brilliant light shines upon mankind and their life is serene. (Pythian 8.95-97)(⊜)
Undeniably certain objections could be raised against this translation of the opening verses of the epod of Pindar’s 8th Pythian ode, beginning with the rendering of the closing phrase (καὶ μείλιχος αἰών) as “and their life is serene.” A better and more literal, if paraphrastic, translation of such phrase would be: “and sweet becomes man’s enduring vital force.”(⦹) Plus it is likewise important to bear in mind, against any Christian-oriented interpretation of the early Greek thought-world, the original value of ἐπάμεροι (lit. “ephemeral”), which had less to do with a limited duration than with the fact that man, one day, is (that is to say, is capable of achieving) this, and then, another day, he is that instead (that is to say, he proves incapable of obtaining what he formerly did); compare, in this sense, the immediately preceding verses, 88-94, of this eighth Pythian: “He who something beautiful and grand newly achieves, / in great splendour, / moved by hope, he flies; / […] but scarce proves for mortals / the increase of their delight, and it crashes down to earth / when shaken by an adverse fate” (our translation).(⊚)
Accordingly, our translation of Pindar’s Pythian 8, vv. 95-97 would be:
Dependent on what, each day, the going is! / What is one? What is he not? / A mere dream of a shadow is man. / Yet whenever Zeus’s gleam reaches him, / a brilliant light shines upon man / and sweet becomes his vital time.
We should like to stress here: (1) the thematic connection between both sets of Pindaric verses, i.e. those from the sixth Nemean and the eighth Pythian (which jointly say, in nuce: “even if we are of their same race, or at least children of the same mother, we cannot compare ourselves to the gods, for only when their light reaches us…,” etc.); and (2) the fact that, brought together, they affirm, if with a different wording, what Heraclitus’s frag. B62 states in turn.(Δ)
Now, it is the difference, underlined by both Heraclitus and Pindar, between men and gods that makes human ὕβρις (hybris, “excess,” to the study of which we dedicated our previous entry “Hybris Over What Is,” entirely absurd; for, again, “scarce proves for mortals / the increase of their delight, and it crashes down to earth / when it is shaken by an adverse fate.”(⦻) Thus, too, Heraclitus’s comparison of man’s “vital force” (αἰών) with a “playful child” under whose “rule” we all are (frag. DK B52).
Pindar, Pythian 8.95-97. Voice: Polymorph
(⦼) Boris Maslov, Pindar and the Emergence of Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 199.
(⊛) Hermann Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy: A History of Greek Epic, Lyric, and Prose to the Middle of ther Fifth Century (Oxford and New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 472; Thomas K. Hubbard, The Pindaric Mind: A Study of Logical Structure in Early Greek Poetry (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1985), pp. 90ff.
(⦿) Pindar, The Complete Odes, trans. A. Verity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 102.
(⧀) Pace Verity, whose translation (like most English translations for that matter) draws on Elroy Bundy’s Studia Pindarica (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1962). See further Frederico Lourenço, “A ‘Cloud of Metaphysics’ in Pindar: The Opening of Nemean 6” (Humanitas 63 (2011): 61-73), as well as Puech’s early comments in Pindare, Néméennes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1923, reprinted 2003), p. 79, n1.
(⧁) Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, p. 472. Cf. Puech’s remarks (in Pindare, Néméennes, p. 75), which turns their logic demonstrative of the fact that, despite their obvious disadvantage to the gods, men posses their own distinctive grandeur after all.
(⊜) Pindar, The Complete Odes, p. 75. Cf. the references to Zeus in Heraclitus’s frags. DK B32 and B64.
(⦹) See Émile Benveniste, “Expression indo-européenne de l’ « éternité »” (Bulletin de la société de linguistique 38 [1937]: 103-39); Robert Beekes, with the assistance of Lucien Van Beek, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (2 vols; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), vol. 1, pp. 46-47.
(⊚) ὁ δὲ καλόν τι νέον λαχὼν / ἁβρότατος ἔπι μεγάλας / ἐξ ἐλπίδος πέταται / […] ἐν δ᾽ ὀλίγῳ βροτῶν / τὸ τερπνὸν αὔξεται: οὕτω δὲ καὶ πίτνει χαμαί, / ἀποτρόπῳ γνώμᾳ σεσεισμένον (ho de kalon ti neon lachon / habrabatos epi megalas / ex elpidos petetai / […] en d’oligoi broton / to terpnon auxetai: houto de kai pitnei chamai, / apotropoi gnomai seseismenon).
(⊘) Zeus does not send any brightness: Zeus is brightness. See our comments on Aeschylus’s frag. 70N in “Hybris Over What Is.”
(Δ) Cf. also Pindar, Olympian 1, vv. 106-107. On the “gods” as life’s “ever-living forces” see “The Last God,” especially note (Δ).
(⦻) Cf. Pindar, Pythian 3, vv. 61, 104-105, as well as Heraclitus’s frag. B43, with which we opened our previous entry “Hybris Over What Is.”
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