Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/74

with elaborate technical methods, and that the exercise of this art is a profession. In the Iliad, it will be remembered, ἀοιδοί appear only as the hired chanters of laments for the dead (xxiv. 720)—that is, if we except the passage (Il. xviii. 604), not found in any MS. of the Iliad, and almost certainly an interpolation, where the ἀοιδός plays for the dancers on the Shield of Achilles. In the Odyssey, the ἀοιδός is already a semi-professional character; the epithet δημιοεργός can be applied to him as well as to the soothsayer, the physician, the herald, the carpenter; though he is still surrounded by the reverence felt for a recipient of direct inspiration. His presence restrains Aegisthus from meditated crime; nor does Aegisthus dare to shed his blood. With Pindar we have come, of course, to the age of professional rhapsodes, who bear the branch of laurel (ῥάβδος): Isthm. iii. 55:—Ὅμηρος...πᾶσαν ὀρθώσαις ἀρετὰν κατὰ ῥάβδον ἔφρασεν | θεσπεσίων ἐπέων λοιποῖς ἀθύρειν: "Homer hath done right to all the prowess (of Ajax), and hath made it a theme for men after-born, by the wand of his lays divine"—where κατὰ ῥάβδον = κατὰ παρὰδοσιν, the branch being the symbol of the tradition. So Nem. ii. 1, the rhapsodes—Ὁμηρίδαι ῥαπτῶν ἐπέων ἀοιδοί—begin "with a prelude to Zeus" (Διὸς ἐκ προοιμίον). The so-called Homeric Hymns are such προοίμια, intended for the use of rhapsodes, and the latest of them are probably as late as Pindar's youth. Pindar's own affinity with the Homeric spirit is seen not merely in echoes of Homeric language