INTRODUCTION.

Looking closer, we discover that the noun it modifies, aiōn (age or lifetime), is actually conceived as a breeze, for Pindar associated it with aēmi (to blow).

And thus, though Pindar has won a reputation for audacity regarding bold and mixed metaphors, we shall find upon examination that his language is always scrupulously weighed and charged with intention. His metaphors, like all else, bear a definite relation to the total effect. He does not mix images incongruously—though sometimes they follow in rapid succession—but is rather inclined to push a single metaphor further than may be superficially obvious. The famous instance of mixed images in the Sixth Olympian Ode is clearly due to an error in the text. The lines are these:

The idea of a whetstone on the tongue to sharpen it, interposed between the god of the sea and the waters of Metopa (with which the phrase "fair-flowing breezes" is in accord), is merely grotesque and has absolutely no motive. Even in a modern writer as eccentric as Browning, it would seem unusually harsh; for Pindar, I believe, it would have been impossible. A little consideration will show what word originally held the place usurped by akonas (whetstone). From echō epi glōssā (I have on my tongue), it is evident that the writer had in mind the proverb "an ox on the tongue," signifying silence. Since his meaning is clearly "I cannot be silent regarding Metopa," we must infer that for the "ox of muteness" he substituted a singing creature: a bird. And to be truly suitable to the context—to harmonize with the presence of the sea and rivers—the voice of a seabird was required. "On my tongue I have (not an ox but) a certain fancy of a vocal seabird, which draws me on, full willing, with a fair stream of breathed sounds." And this, I believe, is what Pindar wrote:

The seabird he chose was a kingfisher. And the idea is more than a mere metaphor; the seabird, as it were, flies seaward and draws the minstrel after it to the "deep-thundering" ocean from the waters of Metopa and the Stymphalian lake in Arcadia—thus symbolizing the passage from Stymphalus to Syracuse, from home to home (oikothen oikade). Nor is the imagery mixed, for it is not the bird itself, but the imagination of it, that is said to be "on the tongue."

¹ Alkyonos was read as akyonos or akonos, and "corrected" to akonas. For the occurrence of such prodelision (as I prefer to consider it) in Pindar, cf. Pythian IV, 70: "For what beginning received (ekdexato) the voyage?" (as Bergk rightly reads, though he spells archē 'kdexato), and 250: "O Arcesilas!" (O 'rkesila); Olympian XIII, 99: "indeed from both sides (dē 'mphoteroithen)."