Pindar

Pindar (c. 518 to c. 438 BC) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes whose work, among the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, survives more completely than any of the others. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian called him by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets for his inspired magnificence and eloquence, though his poetry has long been regarded as difficult; renewed comparison with his rival Bacchylides, whose own poems were discovered in 1896, showed many of Pindar's apparent idiosyncrasies to be typical of archaic poetic genres generally rather than unique to him. He was the first Greek poet known to reflect explicitly on the nature of poetry and the poet's own role, and his surviving victory odes articulate the values of Archaic Greece at the dawn of the Classical period, including a keen sense of life's uncertainty balanced against faith in what mortals can achieve by the grace of the gods.