of metre to music and dancing, we have no longer any precise gauge for it, since we have no sufficiently large examples of contemporary work in the same kind. But there are at least some aspects of his work which we can more confidently recognize as original. One of these is his treatment of the heroic legends which he interwove with his celebration of victories. It may often be remarked that his claim of novelty is made as the immediate prelude to the introduction of such a legend. Thus in Ol. iii. 4—14 such a claim prefaces the story of Heracles having brought the Olympian olive from the land of the Hyperboreans; in Ol. ix. 49 it prepares the mention of the flood, with the mythical derivation of the Opuntian heroes from the λίθινος γόνος of Deucalion and Pyrrha; in Nem. v. 19 it leads up to the legend of the favours which the gods bestowed on the Aeacidae of old. Allusion to local or family myths must have been a familiar resource of the lyrical, as it was of the rhetorical, panegyrist. But we can well believe that no poet before Pindar had shown such boldness or such varied ingenuity in linking his immediate subject with mythical themes which were neither obvious nor trite. In cases such as those just mentioned, Pindar seems to be calling attention to the daring ease of his own transitions. Further, he does not merely introduce mythology as a background to the scene of the festivals, but often elaborates a particular episode so as to give it the separate value of a small but highly finished picture set
