which hung about the court of a great prince, and he idealised the merely powerful Hiero as easily as the really gallant Chromios. Not that he is ever conscious of identifying success with merit; quite the reverse. He is deeply impressed with the power of envy and dishonest arts-the victory of the subtle Ionian Odysseus over the true Aeacid Aias. It was this principle perhaps which helped him to comprehend why Simonides had such a reputation, and why a mob of Athenian sailors, with no physique and no landed property, should make such a stir in the world.
It is a curious freak of history that has preserved us only his 'Epinikoi'-songs for winners in the sacred games at Olympia, Pytho, Nemea, and the Isthmus. Of all his seventeen books-"Hymns; Paeans; Dithyrambs, 2; Prosodia, 2; Parthenia, 3; Dance-songs, 2; Encomia; Dirges; Epinikoi, 4"-the four we possess are certainly not the four we should have chosen. Yet there is in the kind of song something that suits Pindar's genius. For one thing, it does not really matter what he writes about. Two of his sublimest poems are on mule-races. If we are little interested by the fact that Xenophon of Corinth won the Stadium and the Five Bouts at Olympia in the fifth century B.C., neither are we much affected by the drowning of young Edward King in the seventeenth A.D. Poems like Lycidas and Olympian xiii. are independent of the facts that gave rise to them. And, besides, one cannot help feeling in Pindar a genuine fondness for horses and grooms and trainers. If a horse from Kynoskephalae ever won a local race, the boy Pindar and his fellow-villagers must have talked over the points of that horse and the proceedings of his trainer with real affection. And whether or no the
