Olympian and Pythian Odes

mous for her handling of the myth, he crowded his next hymn with mythological figures — the fragment is still preserved (II. 1, 2) — whereupon she said, with a smile: "One ought to sow with the hand, not with the whole sack" (original: "τῇ χειρὶ δεῖν σπείρειν ἀλλὰ μὴ ὅλῳ τῷ θυλάκῳ"). It is unnecessary to emphasize the feminine tact of the advice. On another occasion Korinna is said to have blamed Pindar for having used an Attic word. This, also, is not a bad invention. It accords with the conservative character of woman; it accords with the story that Korinna won a victory over Pindar by the familiar charm of her Boeotian dialect as well as by the beauty of her person. It was in honor of that victory, or another, that her filleted statue was erected at Tanagra, where Pausanias saw it hundreds of years afterwards. Aelian, an utterly untrustworthy scribbler, adds that Pindar, in the bitterness of his heart, called his successful rival a swine. If Pindar used the phrase at all, it must be remembered that Boiotia hus Boeotian sow (O. 6, 90) was a common expression — half spiteful, half sportive — and that the moral character of the swine stood higher with the Greeks than it stands with us. The swine-woman of Phokylides, who was neither good nor bad, was not the sow of the Old Testament or the New. The Greeks were brotherly to the lower animals. Bull, cow, heifer, cock, ass, dog, were at all events high-poetic.

Encouraged, perhaps, by Korinna's success, a younger poetess, Myrtis, attempted to cope with Pindar. She was ingloriously defeated, and sharply chidden by Korinna, with the sweet inconsistency of her sex.
Myrtis.

Pindar was twenty years old when he composed the tenth Pythian in honor of Hippokleas of Thessaly. This poem, as the firstling of Pindar's genius, has a special interest; but it requires determined criticism to find in it abundant evidence of the crudeness of youth. If Pindar was twenty years old at the time when he composed the tenth Pythian, and the tenth Pythian was written in honor of a victory gained Pyth. 22 (Ol. 69, 3 = 502 B.C.), Pindar must have been born in 522 B.C. A close contempo-
Pindar's earliest poem.

Date of his birth.