INTRODUCTION.

had certainly no application to the work of Pindar. He elaborated his poems to such a point that every phrase was calculated, and no word was admitted which did not ‘tell’ in the total effect. In one place indeed he speaks as if he wandered from matter to matter at random ‘like a bee’ (Original: "hote melissa") flitting from flower to flower; but that is only a graceful reserve or eironeia—an expression of the artistic hiding of art. Nor is the contrast between genius and the mere knowledge of rules (phye and techne), on which he often dwells, in any sense inconsistent with the self-consciousness of his own art. His idea of phye (natural talent) was not of some blindly acting force, moving outside rules, successful by sheer strength; nor did he condemn in techne (art/craft) an excessive care for order or diction. By techne, rather, he meant the mere mechanical, slavish application of formulae, where the divine gift of insight is absent; by phye, the power which can wield art more artfully and effectually than ever, because it works freely. His hymns wonderfully unite an appearance of the absence of restraint with the most scrupulous precision of language. The poetry seems to flow with the impulse of a torrent or some free natural force, unable to confine itself; and yet when we look more closely we find that every sentence is measured, every word weighed, every metaphor charged with subtle meanings that play beneath the surface. To be fettered and yet free is the ideal of art, or, in Pindaric phrase, the ‘aim of the Muses’ (Original: "Moisan skopos"); and perhaps no literary artist has ever realized that ideal as perfectly as the poet of Thebes.

For appreciating Pindar, a susceptibility to the effects of words is eminently necessary; for each of his is, as it were, a gem with a virtue of its own, which the poet had fully appreciated before he set it in its place. To show what in editorial waywardness may result from a lack of this susceptibility, I may choose (one of many instances) the last measure of the Sixth Olympian Ode. This poem, written in honor of Agesias of Syracuse, closes with an invocation of Poseidon, who is besought thus:

Cause the delectable flower of my hymns to grow. As the chief feature of the Ode is the story of Iamus, laid after birth in a bed of pansies (ia) and thence deriving his name, the last word anthos (flower) is calculated to suggest the aesthetic virtue of the whole hymn, reminding us, even at the end, of that flowery ‘woodborn wonder’, to which the victor Agesias is compared. And aezein (to cause to grow) is the appropriate verb for a flower.

1 Pythian x. 54.