Olympian and Pythian Odes

that we can date certainly is O. 4 (Ol. 82, 452 B.C.), but O. 8 is often assigned to 450 B.C.

Sundry apophthegms are attributed to Pindar. Most of them show the aloofness, so to speak, of his character.
Apophthegms.

"What is sharper than a saw? Calumny." "What wilt thou sacrifice to the Delphic god? A paean." "Why dost thou, who canst not sing, write songs? The shipbuilders make rudders but know not how to steer." "Simonides has gone to the courts of the Sicilian tyrants. Why hast thou no desire to do the same? I wish to live for myself, not for others." These expressions at least reproduce the temper of the man as conceived by antiquity. Such a self-contained personage could never have made himself loved by a wide circle. Admired he was without stint, often without true insight. The reverence paid his genius was manifested in many ways. Familiar to all is the story that when Thebes was pillaged and destroyed by the Macedonian soldiery, the house of Pindar was spared¹ by the express order of Alexander the Great, whose ancestor he had celebrated in song (fr. VIII. 3).

II.

The poems on which Pindar's fame chiefly rests are the epinikia victory odes, or Songs of Victory, composed in celebration of successes gained at the great national games. It is true that these poems constituted only one phase of his work, but they are the most important, the most characteristic, of all. Else they had not alone survived entire. They were more popular than the others, says Eustathios, because they addressed themselves more to human interests, the myths were fewer, and the obscurity was less. But these reasons, which are strange to us now, do not account for the survival. That which embodies the truest, inliest life of a people comes down, the rest perishes and passes over into new forms. Antique epos, antique tragedy, the Old Attic

¹ "The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus when temple and tow'r Went to the ground."—MILTON.