elements distinguishing it from that of the ordinary citizen of the more cultivated sort. Here, again, we must remember his connection with the Aegeidae. In such houses certain family rites and bodies of sacred lore were usually hereditary. These, combined with political influence, often gave such families peculiarly intimate relations with the chief centres of worship and divination, such as the temples at Delos, Abae, and, above all, Delphi. The direct influence of the great houses on the oracles can be constantly recognised in Greek history. Pindar was, besides, a man of lofty genius, and of that typically Greek temperament in which the sense of natural beauty rose to be a sense of awe as in presence of a divine majesty; as when Plato says of the soul that had looked upon the true loveliness, σεφθεῖσα δὲ ἀνέπεσεω ὑπτία. Such a man was as perfect a teller-forth of the honour of the gods, as truly a heaven-born προφήτης, as the temple of Delphi could have found for its service and the more we study Pindar's poetry, the more we shall read in it the mind of that Delphic religion which, in his time, was still a mighty, if a declining, power. I may illustrate my meaning by a particular trait. Pindar frequently refers to the art of divination as one by which skilled seers win unerring signs from the gods; more especially he renders homage to the great augural clan of the lamidae, whose practice of the μαντικὴ δι' ἐμπύρων on the altar of Zeus entitles Olympia to be emphatically styled δέσποιν' ἀλαθείας,
