Olympian and Pythian Odes

rary of Aischylos (born 525 B.C.), Pindar suggests a comparison with the great Athenian; but no matter how many external resemblances may be found, nay, no matter how many fine sentiments and exemplary reflections they may have in common, the inner dissidence remains.1 One question always arises when the Marathonomaches Marathon-fighter and Pindar are compared, and that is the attitude of the Theban poet during the Persian war.

Pindar and the Persian war.

Was Pindar in thorough sympathy with the party of the Theban nobility to which he belonged by birth, by training, by temperament, or was he a friend of the national cause—as it is safe to call a cause after it has been successful? Within the state there seems to be no question that Pindar was a thoroughpaced aristocrat, and those who think they have noticed greater liberality in the middle of his life have to acknowledge that he became more rigid towards the close. Without the state his imagination must have been fired by the splendid achievements of the Hellenes, and his religious sense must have been stirred by the visible working of the divine power in setting up and putting down. He could not but be proud of the very victories that told against his own country, and yet there is no note in all his poems that shows the kinship that reveals itself in Simonides. The story that the famous fragment in praise of Athens brought upon him the displeasure of his countrymen, which they manifested by the imposition of a heavy fine, reimbursed twofold by the Athenians—this story, with all its variations, the statue, the proxenia state-hospitality/official diplomatic role, has not escaped the cavils of the critics, and does not, in any case, prove anything more than a generous recognition of the prowess of an alien state, if, after all, anything Greek could be alien to a man so fully in sympathy with all

1 “Both Aeschylus and Pindar speak of Etna in volcanic eruption. But Aeschylus—thoroughly Greek in this—fixes our thought on the scathe done to man’s labor. Pindar gives a picture of natural grandeur and terror (P. 1, 20). The lines on the eclipse of the sun [fr. VII. 4] are sublime. But it is not the moral sublimity of Aeschylus. Pindar never rises into the sphere of titanic battle between destiny and will. He is always of the earth, even when he is among the gods.”—Jebb.