Pindar

Pindar, the greatest of the lyric poets and the voice of Delphi for more than forty years, was born at Kynoskephalae, a village near Thebes, around 518 BC.
He was the son of Daiphantos, who belonged to the ancient and noble family of Aigidae. He was taught music early in his age by his father, who was famous flute player and by the eminent musicians Agathocles and Apollodoros, at Athens. He lived most of his life at Thebes and Delphi, where the oracle arranged to pronounce hymns to Gods.
When he died, no one believed that his shadow from Delphi had gone and the priests every night before dinner had a herald to announce around the Oracle "Pindar is coming to have diner with the Gods" and thus they were inviting the dead to enter the temple, where two tables with food, one for Apollo and one for Pindar had been prepared (the so-called Theoxenia).
Thebans were calling him "the eagle of Thebes" and they compared him with the roar of the river.
Pindar, during his life, was honored among all the Greek cities for his poems and he was invited often by tyrants and monarchs to their courts, especially by Amyntas of Macedon, Arkesilaos of Kyrene, Theron of Agrigentum and Hieron of Syracuse, where he lived from 476 to 472 BC.
In 438 BC, at the age of eighty years old, he died in the theater of Argos, at the time he was reciting one of his poems.
Athenians had honored him by making him ambassador (proxenos) and erected a bronze statue after his death. He was fined by Thebans, for glorifying an enemy city, Athens, but later  they made a temple near his house, in order to honor him.
Pindar wrote an enormous number of poems, which the Alexandrian scholars divided in seventeen books. His poetry included dithyrambs, paeans, scholia, encomia, prosodia, treni, parthenia, and epinicia, the last being the only surviving work of his, from the others we have only few fragments.
Epinicia were songs celebrating the victors of games and they were sang by a chorus usually at the scene of the victory or during the feast given after the victor had returned home. The epinicia contained 14 Olympian, 12 Pythian, 11 Nemean and 8 Isthmian odes.
The poetry of Pindar is characterized by sublimity of thought and magnificence and they include warm religious sentiments. Expression, metre and harmonious thought characterize also his poems.