ode is written. Thus at Aegina, where there was a strong jealousy of Athens, he insists—though he shows his consciousness that the topic will not be popular—on doing justice to the Athenian trainer Melesias (Ol. viii. 54). He even can say that the trainer is to the victor as Achilles to Patroclus (Ol. xi. 19). He does not shrink from reproving the king of Cyrene for harshness to a kinsman, or the tyrant of Syracuse for listening to flatterers. He says of a successful boxer that he is ὀντὸς μὲν ἰδέσθαι, "mean to look upon" (Isthm. iii. 68), though συμπεσεῖν ἀκμᾷ βαρύς, "sore to meet in his strength." Pindar is not (to my thinking) deficient in tenderness; but he has too much truth of nature to be sentimental. "A son born in wedlock is dear to a father who is now moving on the path that wends away from youth; yea, it warmeth his soul with love; for when wealth is doomed to be the charge of an alien sought from without, 'tis most grievous to the dying" (Ol. xi. 86). Universally, Pindar's tone resembles nothing" less than that of a hireling encomiast or a courtly flatterer. Even towards the most illustrious of the victors, his attitude is invariably that of an equal, and of one who is privileged to teach, to exhort, and, if need be, to rebuke. We shall readily understand this if we remember the value, for his own day in Greece, of his threefold claim—Aegid descent, intimate relation with the worship of Apollo, and poetical genius.
§ 12. The task proposed to Pindar by those
