Olympian and Pythian Odes

that made Greece what it was. For in the sense that he loved all Greece, that he felt the ties of blood, of speech, above all, the ties of religion, Pindar was Panhellenic. The pressure of the barbarian that drew those ties tighter for Greece generally, drew them tighter for him also; but how? We are in danger of losing our historical perspective by making Pindar feel the same stir in the same way as Aischylos. If he had, he would not have been a true Theban; and if he had not been a true Theban, he would not have been a true Greek. The man whose love for his country knows no local root, is a man whose love for his country is a poor abstraction; and it is no discredit to Pindar that he went honestly with his state in the struggle. It was no treason to Medize to favor the Persians before there was a Greece, and the Greece that came out of the Persian war was a very different thing from the cantons that ranged themselves on this side and on that of a quarrel which, we may be sure, bore another aspect to those who stood aloof from it than it wears in the eyes of moderns, who have all learned to be Hellenic patriots. A little experience of a losing side might aid historical vision. That Pindar should have had an intense admiration of the New Greece, should have felt the impulse of the grand period that followed Salamis and Plataia, should have appreciated the woe that would have come on Greece had the Persians been successful, and should have seen the finger of God in the new evolution of Hellas—all this is not incompatible with an attitude during the Persian war that those who see the end and do not understand the beginning may not consider respectable.

Travels.

The life of a lyric poet was usually a life of travel. Arion is the type of a wanderer, Ibykos and Simonides journeyed far and wide, and although we must not suppose that Pindar went whithersoever his song went, he was not a home-keeping man. His long sojourn in Sicily is beyond a doubt. Aigina must have been to him a second home. Journeys to Olympia, to Delphi, to Nemea, are certain. If he studied under Lasos, he must have studied at Athens, and it is likely that he was familiar with many parts