INTRODUCTION.

various kinds of ‘paronomasia’ (punning). Latin poets, as everyone knows, used to introduce real personages under fictitious designations, metrically equivalent to the original names. Pindar combined this device with etymological allusion. In the Seventh Nemean Ode the strange coinage mapsylakas can, in my opinion, have been invented for no other purpose than to designate Pindar’s younger rival Bacchylides. Mapsylakas is metrically equivalent to Bacchylides and has the same number of letters (psi = pi-sigma). And no enemy of Bacchylides who wished to refine on the significance of his name could have more cunningly combined a plausible derivation and an invidious suggestion. Connecting the first syllable Bacch- with the evil influence of wine on ‘rhyme and reason’, he parodies it by maps ‘wildly, rhymelessly’; and he sees in the second part of the name a relation of the words which mean ‘bark’ (hylao, etc.)¹. Philologists, much nearer to our own day than Pindar, would not have hesitated at such an etymology.

There is in the Eighth Pythian, if my view of the passage is right, an interesting instance of an etymological allusion.

That Ode, written in honor of an Aeginetan, soon after the conquest of Aegina by Athens (B.C. 457), though containing no direct reference to the Athenians, dwells on the uncertainty of prosperity; in a short time, we read, ‘men’s pleasance waxeth; but in the same wise too it falleth to the ground’. There is a clear prophecy of a reversal of fortune for the Aeginetans at the expense of the Athenians. Some words, however, contain a more pointed allusion. The victor who had won his laurel wreath in wrestling had thrown four competitors; and of these defeated men it is said that they did not return home to be welcomed by the smiles of their mothers—

‘they cower, aloof from dances, in lanes’. The expression is strange; but it wins significance if we suppose that one at least of the wrestlers was an Athenian and that lauras alludes to the silver mines of Laurium—Laurion being really a diminutive of laura (lane/mine). The suggestion, then, covertly expressed, is this: an Aeginetan has vanquished an Athenian in wrestling; well, let the Athenian skulk in those mines, the source of the strength of his countrymen. The commercial Aeginetans must certainly have been jealous of the riches which their neighbors

¹ If Pindar had been defending his etymology, he might have supported the connection of -ylides with -ylakas by the connection, suggested in the Odyssey, between Scylla and scylax (whelp).