“Best is water; and gold, like a blazing fire in the night, shines out supreme of all lordly wealth.”
Olympian 1
Pindar wrote choral songs to celebrate victors at the great games — Olympia, Delphi, Nemea and the Isthmus. Each ode sets the athlete's win inside a web of myth, so the poem becomes a meditation on fortune, ancestry and the limits of human success.
He is a main source for several myths, including the tale of Pelops and the founding of the Olympic Games. Later antiquity prized him so highly that Alexander the Great is said to have spared his house when he levelled Thebes.
Legacy
Horace took him as the model for the Roman ode, and the victory odes remain the fullest surviving body of Greek choral poetry.