"And raised to him the suppliant cry,

The hoarse, earth-shaking deity." The suppliant cry is more like an Asiatic than a Greek of the heroic age, for Homer's heroes sob but never whine, and the epithet 'hoarse' is altogether inadmissible; the poet heard the voice of the sea-god in the deep clear sound of the mass of falling water, not in the grating angry roar of the undertow as it scours the beach; but perhaps this is hypercriticism. It is, however, startling to hear how Heber goes on―

Athens, or an Alexander weep for other worlds to conquer.

But the preaching of Pindar is evidence of the disease at its height; nearly all for whom he writes need to be warned against unbounded desires, to be congratulated on having attained all that is attainable; the Basside of staid Egina are as insatiable as the despots of Sicily; the aged Psaumis is as likely to yield to ambition as the youthful Aristagoras. Nothing could be a greater forms the background of the energetic life of contrast to the hopeless peace which always forms the background of the energetic life of the Homeric poems. There Achilles orders the funeral games for his friend with cheerful courtesy, though that friend has warned him that they are soon to meet again in the dreary under-world. Ulysses is thankful to be permitted to recover his kingdom and his wife, how

"Nor called in vain, through cloud and storm, ever much he suffers, and however long he Half seen, a huge and shadowy form,

The god of waters came,'

when Pindar only says, "So he appeared to him hard at his foot."

This is worse treatment than Homer ever received from Pope, for the spirit of the Homeric poetry is not by any means so exclusively classical as the spirit of Pindar. Pindar wrote for men who had received the highest classical culture; the Homerida sung to a people which had not yet formed any distinct idea of culture, and therefore was not classical.

The period of some seventy years between the battle of Marathon and the siege of Potidea, was the culminating period of Grecian life, when the conceptions of the individual, the State, and the nation were all developed, and still worked together in unstable equilibrium, before the inevitable disruption, when the unity of the nation was dissolved by the restless activity of the State, and the unity of the State was dissolved by the restlessness of individual will, and still more, of individual thought. It was a time of boundless ambition, for it seemed to be a season of unlimited possibilities. The types of their age are to be found in a Themistocles, plundering the Egean in the name of Athens; in a Pausanias, eager to be the slave of Xerxes and the lord of Greece; in an Hiero, the master of all Sicily, and panting still for more. For the Greek mind was emancipated from the narrowness of childhood; it perceived that the desires of man are infinite, and its fever fit was severe if not long. It received its quietus in the efforts and disasters of the Peloponnesian war, when the combatants on both sides were animated by fear and hate, not hope, though an Alcibiades might still dream of ruling the Mediterranean from

waits; he does not murmur at the solitary pilgrimage, which must purchase Poseidon's leave to spend a calm old age in peace at home. None expects permanently to alter his position; none is afraid of leaving it before death, unless exposed to the eucroachments of others without a son to defend his old age. Thersites is an exception in the Iliad ; but the λaßpos páros of Pindar might have been made of Thersites'. The high are ever ready to devour the low, and the low are on the watch to tear the high to pieces. The poems of Pindar are full of exhortations not to provoke envy by insolence, and to disregard the envy which snarls vainly at deserved success. All are impressed with an overweening sense of their actual littleness, their potential greatness. "Godlike," in some form or other, is the commonest terin of praise in Homer, but in Pindar it disappears. His heroes are only too godlike in their desires; but he and they are conscious that their achievements are not divine. Homer's heroes rate the gods as pettish children rate their nurses, but they never dream of possessing their greatness. Pindar's heroes, to judge from his repeated admonitions, were envious as well as respectful. The fear of death continues, for the upper world is too bright to leave, though the under world has ceased to be dreary; for the sidwλov, which is unsubstantial for Homer, has become immaterial for Pindar; but still men like to have time to carry out their plans, time to enjoy their success; and they do not yet know that no plans are carried out completely, that success is always disappointing, and therefore they do not like to die; but even this milder fear is not.unmixed with flashes of a strange longing, death is perfect peace at last, who knows but it may give much else that life denied?

All are familiar with the reward of Cleo- | to reign, though it could not profitably govbis and Biton. Pindar tells a similar story ern, had been overthrown by the impetuous of Agamedes and Trophonius, who built the logic of popular and regal passions. The temple of Delphi, and asked the god for their sons of Diagoras were hunted from Rhodes; wages. He promised to pay them on the of all the States whose citizens had asked seventh day, meanwhile they were to make the praise of Pindar, none had escaped the merry. They did as they were bidden, and calamities of faction or war except Opus, the seventh day they laid them down to which was protected by her insignificance, sleep, and died. They say that Pindar sent and Argos, which was safe in her selfishness, to Delphi to ask what was best for a man, while Corinth was secure in her institutions. and the prophetess answered that if he Over Pindar's own country the storm swept made that song, he knew. still more heavily. She experienced the lawless despotism of a knot of men who betrayed her to the Persian, and almost involved her in their own ruin after the Persian had been chased backward to the Hellespont. She experienced the suicidal license of an untrained, unchecked democracy, which attained the supremacy which it abused by foreign force, without even such preparation for power as was implied in conquering it.

The prime of Pindar's manhood coincided with the earlier, fresher, healthier half of this stormy period, and he lived to within ten years of its close. Before he died, Athens had ceased to be the loyal yoke-fellow of Sparta, the city of the violet crown, who had laid the foundations of liberty for Greece at Marathon and Salamis; she was now the despot city, the inveterate enemy of Thebes, whose commons she had intoxicated, in spite of Pindar's warning voice, with the sweets of Sicily had not to endure such humiliations transgression, whose end was utter bitterness. as Thebes. Indeed, she attained to an unexTrue, her guilty greatness had received a ampled degree of splendour, but her destiny shock which proved irreparable at Coronea, exposed her to calamities not less real at the but she had rallied and appeared stronger time, and still more lasting in their effects. and more formidable than ever; Samos was The institutions of all the Greek colonies enslaved and become the private property of were necessarily arbitrary, and conventional a fragment of the Athenian people. Thuria respect ill supplied the place of the traditionand Amphipolis had been founded, and the al sacredness of the hereditary codes of Conmaterial magnificence of the city had reached tinental Greece. Thus the restraining force its highest point. Her great houses, whose was weaker, while the play of national life praises he had sung in brief and guarded was freer, and national growth more rapid. strains, when the triumphal processions of In Sicily, where the life of the Greek comtheir children threaded the busy streets and munities was not dwarfed by great inland jealous crowds, had degenerated into the monarchies or powerful native tribes, the leaders or the victims of the many-headed tendency to restlessness was stronger than beast; Ægina, the ancient rival of Athens, elsewhere, and consequently her whole inwho had been united with her for a moment ternal history till the Roman conquest is by the perils and glories of Salamis, had nothing but a series of constitutional failures. been rapidly outgrown and ruthlessly van- Pindar saw the rough soldier Gelo snatch quished by the policy which saw nothing in Gela from the children of Hippocrates, whose the gallant little island but an eyesore to predecessor's power was founded on the imPeiræus. Yet her fall had not been inglori-pressive mysticism which had restored a body ous. Pindar, who had so often sung the glory of her tutelary Eacidæ, and vindicated them against the injustice of lying rhapsodists, who had no local traditions to guide their songs, was able to persuade himself that success had crowned the valour of her navy in the sea-fight which preceded the last fatal siege; and he and all Peloponnese were willing to forget how partial the success had been, how fruitless it must prove.

The line of Battus was quenched in blood at Cyrene in consequence of the same tendencies to family dissension and autocratic selfishness as those which Pindar had rebuked, after the curious constitution of Demonax, based upon the supposition that the house chosen by Apollo had a divine right

of exiles to a distracted city, and bequeath his prize to Hiero, after whose death it made trial of the harsh, eager despotism of Thrasybulus, before it could attain to liberty. He saw Zancle betrayed by Hippocrates to the Samian exiles, who inflicted on their Sicilian friends what they had suffered from their Persian enemies, while the treacherous despot abandoned his treacherous allies to his brother despot, Anaxilaus of Rhegium.

He saw Camarina, which had been ruined by the jealousy of Syracuse, restored by the despot of her rival Gela, deserted again at the order of his successor, when he transferred his capital to Syracuse, and finally restored by Psaumis. In his days Agrigentum and Himera were subdued by the

mercenaries of the princely Thero, who did | citizens of Naxos and Catana had been his friends more pleasure than Pindar could removed to Leontini to clear the ground ever reckon up; whose father Enesidamus for the experiment. There is some reason had disputed the heritage of Hippocrates to think that the project was given up in with Gelo, and accepted defeat with reckless Hiero's lifetime, as three years after the bravery; and Thero's son was expelled from foundation, we find Chromius, the governor both his cities by Hiero, and executed at of the city, perhaps as the associate, more Megara for his crimes. He saw, too, Syra- probably as the successor, of Dinomenes, cuse humbled on the Helorus, and her who seems to have been an unambitious oligarchical order of proprietors expelled, man, for though he survived his father, he soon to be restored by Gelo, the true founder took no part in the disputes which followed of Syracuse, who first discerned its claim to his death. Hiero's new city did not survive be the capital of Sicily. To vindicate that his dynasty, as a constitutional monarchy or claim he transplanted thither all the in- otherwise, and the violence which prepared habitants of Camarina, half the inhabitants its foundation added largely to the confusion of Gela, and the conquered oligarchs of which the Gelonian dynasty left behind it; Euboea and Megara, while the commons but the experiment is interesting, both in were sold into slavery beyond the limits of itself, and as a partial anticipation of the the island. According to Herodotus he more successful efforts of Alexander and his thought the people a bad neighbour; his successors to found free Greek cities under a ideal was an order of privileged citizens de- monarchy, which, like Antioch and Alexanpendent upon his dynasty, with nothing dria, survived the dynasties of their founders, below them but serfs to cultivate the soil. and sometimes, like Seleucia, attained an His ideal was realized by the course of independent life. events which he helped to prepare, and the realization caused the long anarchy of Sicily; but he was worshipped as a hero after his death, and not altogether unjustly. He had committed few crimes in a situation where most men would have committed many; he had broken the power of the Carthaginians in Sicily for two generations on the Himera; and, by transferring the political centre of the island to the eastern coast, he contributed more than could be seen at the time to delay the Carthaginian conquest till Rome was ready to dispute it. His brother Hiero, who, against his wish, usurped the power after his death, is said to have been yet more illiterate than himself, till attacked by the lingering illness which sometimes stung him into paroxysms of fierce, moody suspicion, and sometimes drove him to take refuge in the slighted embraces of the venal and forgiving muse. His ambition led him to conceive the project of a war with Thero, on the prospect of which Pindar condoled with the latter potentate in Ol. II., but the war itself was averted by the mediation of the courtly Simonides, who suggested that the brother despots had better unite to punish Thero's rebels in Himera. Hiero's reign was the closing period of splendour for the sons of Dinomenes, the saviours of Sicily. Pindar lived to see the expulsion of Thrasybulus, the last survivor, and the slaughter of their friend, the prophet Agesias. He witnessed the complete failure of Hiero's attempt to found a kingdom for his son Dinomenes at Etna, with a Spartan constitution for the ten thousand citizens all of pure Doric blood, as the Ionic

In spite of all the misfortunes which visited the numerous States to which Pindar was bound by ties of sympathy, his career seems to have been a happy one. In the two conquests of his country by the confederate Greeks after Platea, and the Athenians after Enophyta, he scarcely allows himself two lines of sorrow. "Let us cease from bootless misery and publish something sweet, though after pain."* "I endured unspeakable anguish, but now Poseidon hath given me sunshine, after storm; I will fit a crown upon my head and sing." He was a spectator at the Olympic game of life, applauding freely, but staking nothing; the shepherd of the Muses' golaen flocks, which he fed, for one to-day and another to-morrow, and so he was interested in all and attached to nothing. His character co-operated with his circumstances to assure his merited independence and repose. Though over-eager for praise, because detraction was irritating to one conscious of his own worth, he was not really dependent on the verdict of others. Though over-ready for pay, he was content at bottom with his Theban orchard, and the favour of the gods. His position as a festival poet was like that of the great preachers at the court of Louis XIV.,-he might be as lofty as he would in exhortation, but he had to beware how he hinted at blame. It is a remarkable proof of his courage that he calls Hiero's position at Syracuse by its simple, odious (rupavvis), for the first and only time in Pyth. II., when volunteering his first triumphal ode + Isthm. vi. 37.

* Isthm. vII. 7, 8.

name

for a Sicilian court, and exposed to the great-
est risk of altogether losing Hiero's favour.
After this we may believe, with Boeckh, that
Ixion's history is introduced because Hiero
was likely to copy his double sin of incest
and parricide. Simonides might preach to
the lordly Alenada that a faultless man, four-
square and blameless, could not be found on
earth; the gods alone were always sinless,
because always free; it was enough for
mortals to mean well and never to do wrong
by choice; but that is not Pindar's teaching
to kings.
All his comfort for them is, that
the past may be forgotten though it cannot
be undone. He admits, indeed, the well-worn
plea that necessity makes all fair; but he
applies it to the girls of many guests, whose
hearts often flutter up to the Mother of the
Loves in heaven, who had been the slaves of
man, and were now the slaves of Aphrodite,
dedicated by Xenophon to a life not honour-
able then and shameful now, in gratitude for
the honour which the goddess had given him.
To Hiero he speaks in higher, sterner lan-
guage.t "Leaden satiety deadens eager
hope; and it is the heaviest hearing in the
city for the secret heart when good things
fall to another. Notwithstanding, since envy
is better than compassion, strain after honour
still. Rule the host with the rudder of
righteousness; forge thy speech on the anvil
of truth. Many are under thy hand-many
sure witnesses for good or evil; but abiding
in thy bounteous nature, if thou delight at
all in always hearing pleasant praise, be not
soon weary of cost. Be not deceived, friend,
by covetous complaisance; nothing, save the
fame that sounds when men are gone, de-
clareth the life of the departed, both in speech
and song.
Croesus' kindly worth doth not
decay, but the voice of hate weigheth every-
where on Phalaris, the pitiless spirit that
burned men in the brazen bull." What
admirable courtesy there is in the words,
"abiding in thy bounteous nature!" making
the praise the foundation of the advice. So,
too, Arcesilas has the courage of youth and
the wisdom of age; he is a wise physician,
and therefore Pindar is confident that he
will heal the wounds of Cyrene by gentle-

ness.

Again, how cheering is the fragment of the noble dirge composed, most likely, for some man of rank with blood on his hands. How cheering, and yet, too, just, to remit the years of penance underground : "When Persephone shall have accepted at the hands of any the penalty for woe of old, after eight years she sendeth up the souls of such back to the light of day again. Of them mankind

is replenished with stately kings and valiant men of their hands, and such as are mighty by wisdom, and for all after time (when this second life is over) they are called holy heroes among men.'

Pindar's consolations are not always so austere. It is impossible not to feel the soothing tone of Ol. v., so well adapted to comfort Psaumis in an old age, which must have often seemed tame and cheerless. After the fall of the Gelonian dynasty, Sicily must have been like a house the day after a party

dull even to those who disapprove of its yesterday gaiety, like Psaumis, who had small cause to love the dynasty which had As his freedom is desolated Camarina. never morose, his courtesy is never servile. It may be thought, indeed, that his praise of Hiero is exaggerated, for our scanty notices represent him chiefly as fretful, suspicious, and cruel. But there is no evidence that he gloated upon suffering like a Phalaris, or inflicted it with the calculating indifference of a Napoleon; and though sometimes alarmed or irritated into acts from which better men would have shrunk, he was not therefore incapable of sincere and not ineffectual admiration of what Pindar also admired. To have expelled the brutal Thrasydæus from Agrigentum and Himera, and restored those cities to even a tributary freedom; to have driven back the Tyrrhenian armament from Cumæ, and to have delivered Locri from Anaxilaus, may well have seemed acts of heroic virtue to a genial contemporary, especially when we remember that Hiero preserved Rhegium for the children of Anaxilaus. It was natural for Pindar, with his admiration of prosperity, to believe that Hiero was, what he calls him repeatedly, the foremost man of his age, quite the greatest, and almost the best. After all, his promises of Elysium are for Thero, whose worst crime was to have avenged his son harshly at Himera, and who was worshipped with heroic honours at Agrigentum, even after his son's expulsion.

We have said that the period of Pindar's manhood coincided with the culminating period of Grecian life, and Grecian life finds its fullest and most adequate expression in his poetry; it is not only that he addresses a wider audience than the Attic dramatists, and deals with a wider range of subject, but he represents his age as a whole, and brings out its positive as well as its negative side; the faith that created the Parthenon as well as the disputes which echoed in the Agora.

In the dramatists, all tranquil assured belief is gone. Eschylus, while he inculcates belief and submission, puts the best arguments on the wrong side, for, like Pascal, he despises himself for being compelled to sub

mit and believe. Sophocles understands and obeys, and sometimes admires, but he does not reverence or love; a stranger upon earth, he is always just, and sometimes compassionate, but, on the whole, he stands calmly watching the world sweep by without a wish to guide or change its course.

"It's wiser being good than bad,

It's safer being meek than fierce,
It's fitter being sane than mad. "*

There is the beginning and end of his teach-
ing; while Euripides is wholly eaten up by
the question, "Que sais-je?" only he is sen-
sitive and sentimental, whereas Montaigne
took everything coolly. Pindar would not
have represented his age if he had not been
bitten by the incipient scepticism; the
disease attacked him in a characteristic form;
with all his faith in Zeus and Heracles he
could not but think it hard that Geryon
should be put to death for nothing worse
than making a brave fight for his own cattle;
and he even ventures to praise the valiant
rebel" among friends," though he resigns
himself to the conclusion that "custom is
king of all."

the Muses were born; and Cadmus, after many miseries, heard them singing, and Harmonia was given him to wife. If the hymn really was like this, one wonders that Corinna had the heart to tell the young poet, "it was proper to sow handfuls, not sackfuls."

In his maturity he would praise nothing but άλβος and αρετή, πλοῦτος ἀρεταῖς δεδαιδαλμένος, the tokens of divine favour, since any imitations of excellence human study and training may achieve are worthless. He is never weary of pouring scorn on didaxrai dperai: sive conceptions with him; on the contrary, for grace and merit are not mutually excluthey are inseparable; the only real superiority must come from the gods, for they alone possess it. "For what is thy confidence in wisdom, whereby man prevaileth a little over man? For there is no way for spirit of flesh to search out the counsels of gods: he was born of a mortal mother;" unreal superiority which some accident or infatuation may overthrow at any moment, is not a fitting subject for either praise or pride. It is natural to ask how, on such But the predominant tone of his poetry is ject for pride, pride not unmixed with conterms, any superiority could be a fitting subjoyous, and even hopeful, more so than any-tempt, for when Pindar is teaching a boy thing in Pagan literature, for of course the raptures of Plato and the triumphant faith of Epictetus do not belong to Paganism any more than the ecstasies of Shelley or the serene gladness of Goethe belong to Christianity. Paganism, properly so called, seems to approach a filial conception of the relations between heaven and earth for the first and last time in Pindar. He is jealous for the glory of the gods and heroes; "he cannot bear to call any of the blessed gluttonous; mischief lights speedily upon railers." He can praise the acidæ for ever, but has no words for the crimes of Peleus and Telamon. And the honour of the immortals is the happiness of man; in the magnificent hymn, so ingeniously reconstructed in outline by Dissen, after the poet had chosen the marriage of Harmonia out of all the legendary glories of Thebes, in tracing her parentage he told of all the loves of Zeus : how the Destinies' golden horses bare Themis first up.

the awful ladder of heaven to be the mother of the truthful Hours, whose frontlets are golden and their fruit exceeding bright; and then one came, and then another, until at last Hera came, and was received with such exceeding splendour that all the gods prayed Zeus to create other gods worthy to sing of his great magnificence; and then Apollo and

how to wear his honours, he seldom forgets the shame of his defeated rivals. In the first place we may observe that though pride in the glory given is allowable, Spis, according to Pindar, is sure to be severely punished; in the second place, even upon Christian principles, self-adiniration and pleasure in the admiration of others might be permitted to one who had attained the summit of human perfection, as Pindar continually assures his friends that they have done. But grace, reverend grace, grace, who cherisheth life, who worketh all gentleness for mortals, though great, is not unlimited: she cannot give man everything.

ἓν ἀνδρῶν, ὃν θεῶν γένος· ἐκ μιᾶς δὲ πνέομεν
ματρὸς ἀμφότεροι· διείργει δὲ πᾶσα κεκριμένα
δύναμις, ὡς τὸ μὲν οὐδέν, ὁ δὲ χάλκεος ἀσφαλὲς
αἰὲν ἕδος

μένει οὐρανός· ἀλλά τι προσφέρομεν ἔμπαν ἢ
νέον ήτοι φύσιν ἀθανάτοις,
μέγαν

καίπερ εφαμερίαν οὐκ εἰδότες οὐδὲ μετὰ νύκτας
ἄμμι πότμος

οἵαν τιν' ἔγραψε δραμεῖν ποτὶ στάθμαν.