'Best of all things is water.' Songs for Olympic champions, by the poet the ancients ranked first among the lyric poets.
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Pindar wrote choral songs for winners at the great games, the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean, and 45 of them survive complete. Each praises a victor, his family and his city, and then swerves into a myth. The press starts with the first Olympian ode. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
Pindar was born near Thebes around 518 BC and was still working in the 440s. Olympian 1 was written for Hieron, ruler of Syracuse, whose horse Pherenikos won the single-horse race in 476 BC. When Alexander the Great razed Thebes in 335, he ordered his soldiers to leave Pindar's house standing.
The ode opens with a ranking: water is best, gold shines like fire in the night, and the Olympic games outshine every other contest the way the sun outshines the stars. In one of his last odes, for a boy wrestler, Pindar calls a human being 'a shadow's dream.' His Greek is famously hard, compressed and full of leaps, which is the kind of text that pays back reading one word at a time.
Making an interlinear The Victory Odes is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Olympian 1 gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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