Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved.
Quintilian described him as "by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence".
His poems however can also seem difficult and even peculiar.
The Athenian comic playwright Eupolis once remarked that they "are already reduced to silence by the disinclination of the multitude for elegant learning".
Some scholars in the modern age also found his poetry perplexing, at least up until the discovery in 1896 of some poems by his rival Bacchylides, when comparisons of their work showed that many of Pindar's idiosyncrasies are typical of archaic genres rather than of the poet himself.
The brilliance of his poetry then began to be more widely appreciated.
However his style still challenges the casual reader and he continues to be a much admired though largely unread poet.
Pindar is the first Greek poet to reflect on the nature of poetry and on the poet's role.
Like other poets of the Archaic Age, he has a profound sense of the vicissitudes of life, but he also articulates a passionate faith in what men, by the grace of the gods, can achieve, most famously expressed in his conclusion to one of his Victory Odes:
Creatures of a day!
What is a man?
What is he not?
A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being.
But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendor given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days.
(Pythian 8)
His poetry illustrates the beliefs and values of Archaic Greece at the dawn of the classical period
