of legend with equal vividness. Continuous narratives of the heroic past had ceased to satisfy the imagination; but faith was still living. The effort of Pindar's age—stirred as it had been to the core by that great trilogy of national life, the Persian invasions—was to grasp a well-defined episode; to see the heroes moving; to hear them speaking; to throw back upon their world such a light of contemporary reflection as should make them seem nearer and more real. The history of Greek literature is not a series of chapters, but the course of a natural growth, the voice of Greek life from age to age. Pindar's place in that development is of singular interest. He stands between epos and drama. The phase of Greek mind which shaped the Iliad and the Odyssey is passing into that which shaped Attic Tragedy. Pindar is the lyric interpreter of the impulse which received mature expression from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Olympia, with its athletes, its statues, and its temples corresponded to the essence of Greek drama—action idealised by art and consecrated by religion. When Sophocles, by an effective anachronism, describes the chariot-race of Orestes at the Pythian games, we feel how naturally and easily a Greek imagination could revive the heroes amid the surroundings of such a festival. It is not only by his subjects, but still more by his manner of treatment, that Pindar exhibits the influence of the πανηγύρεις: and, like Olympia itself, the temper of his work illustrates the spiritual unity of the best Greek art in every form.
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