Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/104

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Aegina, sweet song of mine, on every freighted ship, on each light bark." In Pindar's frequent insistence on the supreme value of song as the record of great deeds we can sometimes feel a tacit reference to the art with which here he openly contrasts his own. Such princes as the Syracusan Hiero were patrons alike of poet and of sculptor. Without imagining any rivalry in a jealous or sordid sense, we can understand how a poet, conscious that his work possessed the secret of unfading youth, should have been impelled to claim for it a permanence so much less obvious to the many in his own day than that of the marbles which seemed to have made the victory immortal. The marble has too often perished; the song—the breath of an hour, as the hearers may have thought it—attests for us the truth of Pindar's claim, ῥῆμα ἐργμάτων χρονιώτερον βιοτεύει. Within his lifetime, the school of Argos was represented by Ageladas, the master of Myron, Polycleitus, and Pheidias. Among the works of Ageladas, Olympia possessed a chariot-group commemorating the victory of Cleisthenes of Epidamnus in 517 B.C., besides two statues of athletes. At Olympia were Myron's Discobolus, his statue of the runner Ladas (who expired in the moment of victory), of the Lacedaemonian Chion, of a boy-boxer, of a pancratiast, and of a victor in the chariot-race. Myron, though of the Argive school, was a native of Eleutherae in Boeotia, and helps to illustrate Pindar's exulting refutation of the proverbial Βοιωτίαν ὗν (Ol. vi. 90). Canachus, of the