of a national unity could not be worthily commemorated in song which that conception had not helped to inspire. Pindar's age was one in which a really great poet could scarcely fail to be in accord with the quickened sense of Hellenic kinship. The years 502 to 452 B.C. measure the limits of his extant work; his happiest activity falls in the period just before and after the invasion of Greece by Xerxes. A great danger had drawn the members of the Hellenic family closer together; a great deliverance had left them animated by the recent memory of deeds which seemed to attest the legends of Agamemnon and Achilles; warmed by a more vivid faith in those gods who had indeed been with them in the hour of trial; comforted by a new stability of freedom; cheered by a sense of Hellenic energies which could expand securely from the Pillars of Hercules to the Phasis, from the Nile to the furthest point that man may reach on the way to the Hyperboreans; exalted in thought and fancy by the longing to body forth all this joy and hope in the most beautiful forms which language and music, marble, ivory, and gold could furnish for the honour of the gods, and for the delight of men who were their seed through the heroes. Aeschylus, in his Persae, heralds as with a clarion-note the advent of this age: Pindar, in his Odes of Victory, expresses some of its most brilliant and most suggestive aspects.
§ 3. Every great Hellenic artist of the fifth century B.C. was vitally affected by his own relation
