INTRODUCTION.

dragged out of the earth at Laurium; but this jealousy was still more bitter if, as has been plausibly suggested¹, Laurium originally belonged to Aegina herself and was wrested from her by Athens, ‘the fountain of silver’ being really the fountain of discord between the two cities throughout the early part of the 5th century.

We should not expect to find one so punctual as Pindar in the use of words errant in the matter of metaphors. For in this as in other respects Greek literature was marked by temperance; in Greek writers there is not that oriental exuberance of metaphorical language, which, at first attractive through its very strangeness to the western mind, soon offends the dry understanding. This shyness in regard to metaphor produced the habit of qualification; as when a chorus of maidens, in the Iphigenia among the Tauri, comparing themselves collectively to a bird, add apteros, ‘a bird—but wingless’. The oestrus which drove Io is called by Aeschylus ardis apyros, ‘a goad—but unforged’; Orestes and Pylades in the Orestes are ‘Bacchants—but wandless’ athyrsol; discord in the same play is ‘fire, but not of Hephaestus’. In Pindar we shall find that his metaphors, when they do not arise naturally out of the metaphorical usage of a word in common speech, are due to some motive which renders them appropriate. In the expression

the comparison of strains of music to the folds of a dress enveloping the object arises smoothly out of a metaphor latent in the verb daidaloun (to work cunningly). The remarkable image of a hymn as

has its justification in the use of the mitra (headband) to bind together the leaves of the victor’s crown, and kanachada is the qualification of the image; ‘a headband—but of sounds’. This temperance in direct metaphorical language is combined with a sharp sensibility to the metaphors latent in words, leading to a choice of harmonious phrases. Thus syn theo phyteutheis olbos (wealth planted with god) (in the Eighth Nemean) followed by Kinyran ebrise plouto suggests a tree weighed down by its fruit, but does not force the image on the vision. In another passage (Nemean 11. 7) euthypompos (straight-escorting), implying the image of a wind, seems at first sight to stand alone.

¹ By Mr. Mahaffy (Rambles and Studies in Greece, p. 163). This hypothesis explains (1) the power of Aegina, (2) the existence of an Aeginetan metric system, (3) the allusion in the Persae of Aeschylus, which indicates that the mines had only recently come into prominence at Athens.