Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/60

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any phase of democracy which could be intelligibly indicated as the rule of "the raging crowd." Clearly, I think, he is referring—in phrase which Siceliots could well appreciate—to those violent democratic revolutions which more than once convulsed Sicilian cities, and overthrew tyrannies, in the earlier part of the fifth century. There is no reason to doubt the warmth or the sincerity of the admiration which Pindar felt for the type of stable and reasonable democracy—for the Athens of Themistocles and Pericles. "Fairest of preludes is the renown of Athens for the mighty race of the Alcmaeonidae[1]...What home, or what house, could I call mine by a name that should sound more glorious for Hellas to hear?" κλειναί, μεγάλαι, εὐώνυμοι, λιπαραί, ἰοστέφανοι, ἱεραί—such are the epithets which Pindar elsewhere bestows on Athens; but most interesting of all, perhaps, is the reference in Nemean v., where, speaking of Menander[2], the Athenian trainer of an Aeginetan victor, he says,—χρὴ δ' ἀπ' Ἀθανᾶν τέκτον' ἀθληταῖσιν ἔμμεν: "meet it is that a shaper of athletes should come from Athens." Those who know Pindar's style, and who remember his frequent comparison of the poet's efforts to the athlete's, will scarcely doubt that, when he wrote those words, he was thinking of the early days when his own young powers had been disciplined at Athens by Lasus of Hermione.

§ 5. Apart from his sympathies with any particular polity, or his relations to any one city, there

  1. Pyth. vii. ad init.
  2. Nem. v. 49.