{"id":35839,"date":"2026-11-02T10:05:21","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T16:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=35839"},"modified":"2026-10-31T12:27:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T17:27:28","slug":"from-the-durant-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/02\/from-the-durant-15\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Durant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The Life of Greece<\/em>, p375:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>He [Pindar] worked painstakingly, composing the music for each poem, and often training a chorus to sing it.  He wrote hymns and poems for deities, dithryambs for the festivals of Dionysus, parthenaia for maidens, enkomia for celebrities, skolia for banquets, threnoi, or dirges, for funerals, and epinikis, or songs of victory, for winners at the Panhellic competitions.  Of all these only forty-five odes remain, named after the games whose heroes they honored.  Of these odes, again, only the words survive, none of the music; in judging them, we are in the position of some future historian who, having the librettos of Wagner&#8217;s operas but nothing of the scores, should list him as a poet rather than a composer, and should rank him by the words that once attended upon his harmonies.  Or if we picture some Chinese scholar, unfamiliar with the Christian story, reading in one evening, in lame translation, ten Bach chorals divorced from their music and ritual, we shall measure our justice to Pindar.  When read today, ode after ode, in the silence of the study, he is beyond comparison the dreariest outpost in the classical landscape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, I <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/16\/book-report-the-complete-odes-by-pindar-translated-by-anthony-verity-2007\/\" target=\"_new\">didn&#8217;t find him that bad<\/a>, although I suppose someone has to be the dreariest, and I&#8217;m not the one to measure who is most dreary in the ancient canon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Life of Greece, p375: He [Pindar] worked painstakingly, composing the music for each poem, and often training a chorus to sing it. He wrote hymns and poems for deities, dithryambs for the festivals of Dionysus, parthenaia for maidens, enkomia for celebrities, skolia for banquets, threnoi, or dirges, for funerals, and epinikis, or songs of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-durant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35839"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35841,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35839\/revisions\/35841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}