Olympian and Pythian Odes

parents are said to have come to the city from an outlying northwestern deme, Kynoskephalai, a high hill overlooking the swamp Hylike. Of his infancy we know nothing.

Pindar of Kynoskephalai.

The tale that bees distilled honey on his lips is told over and over of the childhood of poets and philosophers. Non sine dis animosus infans a courageous infant, not without the gods, we are as ready to believe to be true of him as of any other great man. Of course he enjoyed the advantage of an elaborate training. Perhaps Boeotians trained even more than did the Athenians. The flute he learned at home, and it is supposed that at a later period he enjoyed the instructions of Lasos of Hermione,

Training.

the regenerator of the dithyramb; although it must be noted that the Greeks have an innocent weakness for connecting as many famous names as possible in the relation of teacher and pupil. The statement imposes on nobody. One goes to school to every great influence. It is only honest to say, however, that if Pindar studied under Lasos he was either an ungrateful scholar or underrated his indebtedness to his master. Unfortunately the jibbing pupils are sometimes the best, and the teacher's fairest results are sometimes gained by the resistance of an active young mind. At all events, Pindar has very little to say about training in his poems, much about native endowment, which was to him, as an aristocrat, largely hereditary. We may therefore dismiss Pindar's teachers—Skopelinos, Apollodoros, Agathokles. It is enough for us to know or to divine that he was carefully trained, and had to submit to the rude apprenticeship of genius. First a drill-master for others, then a composer on his own account, he had to work and wait. His great commissions did not come until he had won a national name. Goethe has commended, as others have done before and others have done since, the counsel of noble women to all who seek the consummation of art, the caput artis, decere the head of art is to be fitting. Korinna—the story is at least well

Korinna.

invented—Pindar's fellow-student, not his teacher, gave him a great lesson. In his first poem, he had neglected to insert myths. Admonished of this omission by Korinna, and remembering that his monitress was herself fa-