Bacchylides was born on Ceos, a small, dry island of the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea, at the end of the sixth century before the common era, into a family that made its living from song. His mother was a sister, or a close kinswoman, of Simonides of Ceos, the most celebrated lyric poet of the previous generation, the man the Greeks called honey-tongued and who had invented a technique for remembering anything; in his uncle's household, among the hired choirs and commissioned poems, the boy learned the family trade from the ground up. His working life belongs to the first half of the fifth century, roughly 485 to 452, the decades when the Greek cities, fresh from their victories over the Persian kings, were richest in pride and most eager to be sung. The trade he practised was the epinikian, the victory ode: when a man won at the Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, or Isthmian Games, his city hired a poet to fix the triumph in verse, and a choir of boys sang the finished song through the streets, dancing the victor's praise to the lyre. Bacchylides became one of the two great masters of the form, and the shadow of the other, Pindar of Thebes, lay across his whole career.

Ancient and later rhetorical tradition made Simonides famous not only as a poet but also through the story that a collapsed banquet hall led him to recognise the power of ordered visual memory. That anecdote belongs to the later tradition about Simonides and the art of memory; it should not be treated as a documented event from Bacchylides' childhood. What is safer is the literary relationship: Bacchylides worked in the same professional world as Simonides and inherited a Cean tradition of commissioned choral song.

Bacchylides and Pindar sometimes wrote for the same patrons and occasions, making comparison between them unavoidable. Hiero of Syracuse's Olympic chariot victory in 476 BCE, for example, received both Pindar's Olympian 1 and Bacchylides' Ode 5. Bacchylides often favours lucid narrative and extended mythic scenes, while Pindar is frequently denser and more compressed. Those differences are literary observations rather than an ancient league table in which one poet was officially ranked immediately below the other.

The story inside the fifth ode is among the most haunting in Greek poetry. Heracles, the hero of monstrous strength, has gone down alive into the underworld to fetch the hound Cerberus for his final labour, and there, among the fluttering dead, he meets the shade of Meleager, the prince of Calydon, still burning with the wound of his old story: the great boar hunt, the quarrel over the hide, the uncles he killed, and his mother Althaea, who avenged her brothers by burning the log on which his life had been pegged. The two heroes talk, and Heracles, moved by pity and something more, asks the dead man for the hand of his sister Deianira in marriage. The shade warns him gently, and the poet's listeners knew the warning's point, for Deianira is the woman who, years later, would take the blood of the dying centaur Nessus as a love charm and smear it on Heracles' robe, and the poison would eat the hero's flesh and drive him to the pyre on which he became a god. Bacchylides tells all this with the restraint that was his signature: the grief of the dead prince, the courtesy of the living one, and the marriage of Heracles arranged in the land of death like a guest invited to his own funeral. The ode ends where a good story should, with beauty and doom in the same sentence.

His third ode set another immortal scene, this one carved from history rather than myth. Croesus, the last king of Lydia in Asia Minor, the richest monarch of his age, had asked the oracle of Delphi, the sacred shrine of Apollo, whether he should attack the rising power of Persia, and had been answered that if he crossed the river Halys he would destroy a great empire. He crossed, and the great empire he destroyed was his own. Cyrus the Persian took his capital Sardis, and Croesus, broken, was laid on a pyre of dry wood to be burned alive, and as the flames were lit he remembered the wise Athenian Solon, who had once warned him to call no man happy until he was dead, and three times he cried the name of Solon into the smoke. Apollo, god of Delphi, had been served well by Croesus in better days, and the god pitied him: a whirlwind snatched the king bodily from the flames and set him down in the far northern land of the Hyperboreans, beyond the north wind, where no one grows old, while on the pyre a silent image of the king was left for the Persians to watch burn. Bacchylides sings the rescue as the god's repayment of old kindness, and the detail of the phantom on the pyre, the ghost of a king standing in for the saved man, has haunted readers for twenty-five centuries. Herodotus tells the same story in his history, without the phantom, and the two tellings together show what the poet did best: take what everyone knew and return it polished until it gleamed.

Bacchylides' Dithyramb 17 sends Theseus into the sea during the voyage to Crete. Minos challenges the Athenian hero's claim of divine parentage and the confrontation culminates in Theseus leaping from the moving ship. Dolphins carry him to the marine hall of his father Poseidon, where Amphitrite receives him, places a purple cloak around him and crowns him with a garland. Theseus then reappears beside the ship. The poem had strong Delian and Athenian cultic associations, but the action of the dive itself takes place at sea, not on the island of Delos.

Bacchylides' later life is poorly documented. His modern recovery is much clearer. A papyrus containing a large body of his poetry was brought from Egypt to the British Museum in the autumn of 1896, and F. G. Kenyon published the first edition in 1897. The manuscript preserved the substantial series now numbered as epinician odes followed by six dithyrambs, though not every poem is complete. Before this discovery Bacchylides was known mainly from scattered quotations and fragments; afterwards scholars could compare his surviving work directly with Pindar and study a second major corpus of Classical Greek choral lyric.