Pindar (Morice)/Chapter 4

by Francis David Morice

 

CHAPTER IV.

THE FOUR GREAT GAMES.

With but few exceptions, the extant Odes of Pindar are devoted to the celebration of equestrian and athletic successes at one or other of four great national festivals. Fragments of his other writings show that he excelled in every branch of choral poetry; but of all his works, the Epinicia or Triumphal Odes were those which ancient critics most admired, and it is by these alone that modern readers can test his claim to a place among the great poets of the world.

Voltaire, it is said,^[1] once made a great attempt to understand Pindar. But the gorge of the fastidious philosopher rose at the first crude notion which he formed of the subject-matter of the Odes, and of Pindar's relations with his royal patrons. He saw in Pindar only "an unintelligible and bombastic Theban, a poet of the boxing-ring, the first violin of King Hiero!" Eminent Frenchmen, when they give their minds to it, do contrive to express strange opinions on the literature of foreign nations, and of antiquity. The late M. Thiers, when Mr Nassau Senior asked him, "Do you place Racine above Shakespeare?" replied that he only knew Shakespeare through translations, but that he did place Racine above Homer and Virgil! And admirers of Pindar may be consoled by remembering that the critic who dealt so severely with the Theban poet was no kinder to Shakespeare. "He has spoiled the taste of the [English] nation. He has been their taste for two hundred years; and what is the taste of a nation for two hundred years will be so for two thousand."^[2]

The judgment of competent students will scarcely endorse the scornful criticism of Voltaire. Yet it must be owned that a modern reader, plunging without special preparation upon a study of Pindar's Odes, will be not unlikely to find himself, for a time at least, in sympathy with it. To appreciate Pindar, it is necessary to lay aside prejudices, to be prepared for surprises, and to hesitate before forming opinions fixed beyond the possibility of future modification. It is necessary, also, to have some preliminary notion of the ideas, the tastes, and the modes of life of those for whom he wrote. Undoubtedly, if his poems deserve immortality, this will be due to qualities in them independent of the accidents of time and place,—to their power of touching sympathies and appealing to instincts which are common to all men of adequate culture in every age and in every nation. But the surroundings of a poem are apt to distract attention from its deeper poetic qualities. And the latter, in the case of a poet whose whole style and subject-matter are influenced by his peculiar surroundings, will fail to exert their due effect on readers perplexed at every turn by allusions which they do not understand, sentiments into which they do not enter, and modes of expression for which nothing in their previous literary studies has prepared them.

"Un chantre de combats à coups de poing," says Voltaire; and the modern reader, who finds that races, boxing-matches, and wrestlings do in truth supply the chief occasions of Pindar's poetry, will certainly be haunted with a feeling that no treatment, however skilful, could convert such occasions into suitable themes for lofty verse. How could they excite in a poet those deep and genuine emotions of which true poetry is the expression, and which in other ages have been awakened only by great national triumphs and reverses, or by circumstances of absorbing personal interest, the crash of empires or of creeds, the throes of political and religious and moral convulsions in nations or in individuals, the fervours of religion, the raptures and the torments of love?

To justify Pindar's choice of themes, it is not enough to show that there was a demand on the part of his patrons for poetry on such subjects. It must be shown also that athletic contests did, as a matter of history and for sufficient reasons, excite in the Greeks of his day a genuine enthusiasm, and invest themselves with associations which might well furnish matter for poetry. We may not, after all, find ourselves able to share this enthusiasm, but we shall be less inclined to judge of it harshly if we can convince ourselves that it was sincere.

Now Grecian history supplies abundant proof that equestrian and athletic successes in the four great games of Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, and the Isthmus, were esteemed even by statesmen and philosophers as events of serious importance, and that not merely to the individuals who obtained them, but to the states whom these individuals represented. Solon, the great Athenian reformer, offered the enormous reward of 500 drachmas, equivalent to one year's income of an Athenian citizen of the wealthiest class, to the winner of a prize at Olympia, and 100 for a victory at the Isthmus. And it is actually stated that this was a reduction, and that before Solon's time the public rewards of victors were even larger.^[3] We hear also that a certain Cylon, who made an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself as tyrant of Athens, backed by a powerful array of kinsmen and admirers, owed much of his influence to an Olympic victory; and that he selected the recurrence of the Olympic festival as a suitable opportunity for his attempt, trusting to the associations which this festival would recall, as likely to influence in his favour the Athenian public. So Alcibiades, when at a particular period in his tortuous political career he desired to produce among the Greeks a feeling of respect for Athens and a weakening of Spartan influence, saw in the Olympic games his best opportunity for effecting this result. Seven four-horse chariots entered in the name of the ambitious Athenian dazzled the astounded spectators, secured to their owner the first and the second prize, and secured to him further the triumph (for the time at least) of his policy. And at the most critical moment of Grecian history, when the Persian Xerxes was advancing into Bœotia with the innumerable hosts which were to avenge upon Athens the burning of the Lydian capital—when Leonidas and his noble company threw away their lives in vain in the defile of Thermopylæ, and the united fleets of Greece were retiring before the irresistible foe at Artemisium,—not all the perils of their common country could make the Greeks abandon their accustomed festival. "What are the Greeks doing?" asked Xerxes of some Arcadian deserters.—They were celebrating the Olympic games.

Thoroughly to explain the Greek idea of the importance of these contests would require a book to itself. It must suffice to point out various considerations which may assist us to some extent in appreciating it.

We must remember first that the methods of war in early Greece made physical strength and dexterity a really important qualification in a warrior. Of strategy or even tactics we find little trace in the early history of Greek wars. The battles of the Iliad are won by the prowess of individual champions, not by skilful organisation of forces, or choice of positions, or well-timed employment of reserves. To fight in the forefront of the battle is Homer's conception of a general's duty. And the result of an ancient Waterloo depended on the presence, on this side or on that, of the more numerous and the more efficient prototypes of "Shaw the Life-guardsman."

Even when the old quasi-feudal military system of Greece had given place to some sort of organisation of forces, when cavalry, heavy infantry, and skirmishers were separately drilled, and employed on a definite principle, individual prowess would still tell enormously on the fortunes of the day. Two long lines of infantry, pushing against each other with pikes,—such was the main aspect of a Greek battle at its most critical moment. The cavalry rarely formed an important element in an army, the archers and slingers were considered an inferior branch of the service; it was in the line of "hoplites" that the mass of citizen-soldiers were to be found. Thus soundness of wind, suppleness of limb, strength, nerve, and weight, were to a great extent the measure of a citizen's power to aid his city in her time of need. And while the legislators of Sparta secured the prevalence of these qualities by a compulsory and universal athletic training, other states encouraged by every available means, by local contests and by rewards to native champions, the growth of athletic tastes in their citizens.

Again and again in Pindar we find athletic triumphs associated with success in war. "Oft," he says, as he praises his favourite Ægina,^[4]—

"Oft have the heroes she has borne
The crown of sportive contests worn,
Oft in rapid fight won fame."

And so the success at the Isthmus of the Theban Melissus is described as compensating for a terrible military reverse which had swept off four members of his family, and as opening a new era of glory for the house which had ever since lain, as it were, under a cloud.^[5]

'Twas theirs the gallant steed to rear
And Ares of the brazen spear
Their warlike might did bless;
But on their home in wrath the tempest leapt,
And from their hearth four hero-brethren swept:
Then from the sky once more the storm-cloud wild
Passed! and the earth again with blushing roses smiled.
Such was the will of Heaven. The earth-shaking king
Who loves Onchestus, and the ridge
That towers o'er Corinth's Ocean-bridge,
Bids us once more in triumph sing,
Tuning for their high race the echoing string.
For wrapt in slumber still and deep
Long had their glory lain asleep.
'Awake!' he cried;—at once she woke:
From all her form, as sparks of fire,
Beams of divinest beauty broke,
Bright as when Phosphor leads the starry choir!"—(S.)

And, addressing Aristagoras of Tenedos,^[6] the poet exclaims that a descendant of the mail-clad warriors whom Orestes led from Amyclæ might well be expected to achieve a foremost place among athletes. Thus athletic prowess was regarded by the Greeks of Pindar's day not as a mere useless accomplishment, but as a real measure of a man's worth to his country. The power of dealing good blows in the boxing-ring, or of grappling an antagonist in the "pancratium" (a sort of mauling-match in which legs and arms were employed ad libitum), or of distancing him in the foot-race, made a man a better soldier, and by consequence a more valuable citizen. Even in our own day have we not heard rumours of official recognition of similar qualifications in army-candidates? and was it not the Duke of Wellington who declared that "the battle of Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of Eton"?

But these considerations will not serve to explain the value set by the Greeks on successes in the chariot-race. Unless the victor drove his own chariot, which was not usually the case, no especial physical qualifications were implied by such a victory. Yet these triumphs were as much or even more esteemed than were those of the boxer, the runner, or the wrestler. How was it that the bard could be roused to enthusiasm by the successes of a champion who need not necessarily so much as witness his own victory, much less contribute to it by his exertions?

To answer this question, it is necessary to realise the associations surrounding the whole subject of horse-keeping in Greece. It was the chief outward and visible sign of wealth and aristocracy. The geographical features and the political divisions of early Greece prevented the accumulation of landed property on a large scale. Architecture and the arts of painting and sculpture were not till a later period sufficiently advanced to encourage the display of wealth by the rearing of magnificent palaces or the collection of valuable works of art. A rich man, who wished to use his wealth like a prince and not like a miser, had a somewhat limited choice of objects on which to expend it. Such were the undertaking at his own charges of some expensive public duty (a "Liturgia," as the Greeks called it), hospitality on a large scale, and, lastly, the maintenance of a fine stud of horses. So intimate was the connection between horse-keeping and aristocracy in Greece, that we hear in one state of "Hippobotæ" or "Horse-rearers" as the recognised title of its nobles. Æschylus calls horses "the ornament of wealthy pride;" Plato couples "wealth and horse-breeding" together as synonyms; and Aristotle remarks that "wherever a state is strong in horses, the chief power will be found to reside with the nobles." Thus the chariot-race recalled associations of wealth and splendour, which dazzled the vulgar, and which, in the judgment even of educated Greeks, at a time when aristocratical sentiment was still prevalent, and a wealthy and ancient house was looked upon as a lingering survival of the Heroic Age, might well be the theme of a poet's homage. It is as the antithesis to the miserly hoarding of wealth, that its liberal expenditure on horses and chariots is admired and applauded by Pindar. Wide is the power of wealth well used,^[7] he exclaims. Wealth decorated with triumphs, and lavished freely on noble ambitions, shines like a dazzling star.^[8]

"But if there be whose grovelling soul hath planned
With churlish scorn his store to hug and hide,
Tell him that such have lived unknown and nameless died."^[9]—(S.)

Every city of any importance in Greece encouraged athletic prowess and lavish expenditure of wealth in its citizens by the institution of local contests, sanctified by all the ceremonies of religion, and placed usually under the patronage of a local deity. But all these minor celebrations were eclipsed by the glories of the four great games, and far above all in unapproachable supremacy towered the majestic feast of Olympia. It is impossible now to trace the steps by which these four festivals raised themselves above the mass of similar gatherings to the dignity of Pan-hellenic celebrations—Panegyreis, as they were properly called, "Universal gatherings." That this supremacy was of comparatively recent date can be shown by many arguments: we may content ourselves with one, the silence of Homer. But in Pindar's time they were generally regarded as having existed unchanged from the most remote antiquity. And around the story of their foundation masses of legend had gathered, connecting them with the greatest names and the most thrilling adventures of the Heroic Age. It mattered not that sober chroniclers, and the records of victories preserved in the great Olympian temple, proved beyond doubt that the Olympia had once been a mere local festival of the Pisatans, or that innovations of various kinds were known to have been introduced from time to time as to the nature and arrangements of the contests. To Pindar and to the average Greek of his day, the games in which a Thero or an Alcimedon contended were the very games in which the mythical heroes of Greece had shown their prowess, the glorious contests that Heracles founded by the tomb of Pelops.^[10] Thus to engage in them was to assist in maintaining a divinely-ordered institution; it was an act of piety towards the deified founder, as well as to the hero whose tomb they graced, and the god whose presence consecrated the locality. More than this, it was to tread in the steps of divine and heroic ancestors, and to give evidence that the lofty ambitions of a glorious progenitor lived yet in the bosoms of his true-born descendants. Accordingly, all those memories and associations of religion and of antiquity, which formed, as we have seen, the very centre and substance of the highest developments of Greek Choral poetry, were gathered as it were into a focus in the Olympic festival, and reflected their splendours upon the victorious competitors in its lists. The contests of Olympia, says the Roman Horace,^[11] as he recalls the sentiment of Greece on this subject, raise the victors "aloft to join the gods." And this halo of glory, reflected on the victors from the heroic past, seems to Pindar not merely to merit but to demand the noblest utterances of his muse.

"Such service divine at the poet's hand the conqueror's crownèd locks demand:
Lyre and flute and shapely lays
Must join Ænesidanius' son to praise
With honour meet. And Pisa bids me sing,
Whence immortal lays for mortals spring,
When, in the rites ordained of Heracles,
The Ætolian arbiter with sentence fair
Garlands with olive grey the victor's hair."^[12]

The judge, the competitor, and the poet who celebrates his victory, each (be it noticed) is discharging a sacred duty: the rites are "ordained of Heracles;" hence the obligation to fulfil them, and hence the glory which they reflect upon the victor.

But it was not in their religious aspect alone that the great games influenced so powerfully the imagination of every cultivated Greek. He saw in them also the chief and almost the only concrete embodiment of an idea, which in the age of Pindar more than ever before was growing and gaining ground in Greece,—the sentiment of Pan-hellenic unity, the conception of an absolute and even physical distinction between Greek and Barbarian. The period of Pindar's youth and early manhood coincides precisely with the successive invasions of Greece by Persia, which more than any other event in their history taught the scattered clans of Greeks to regard themselves as a single nation. Now the right of competition in the four great games was the privilege of every Greek, and of Greeks alone. Not all the ordinances of Greek religion were withheld from foreigners. Lydians like Crœsus, Italians, Phrygians, are all described as consulting the great national oracle of the Greeks at Delphi; but not the Great King himself could enter a chariot for the prize of Olympia or Delphi. When the Macedonian princes claimed this right, it was not until satisfactory proof of their Hellenic ancestry had been demanded and furnished that their claim was allowed. Greek princes in distant colonies, like Arcesilas of Cyrene, were careful to retain their position as members of the Hellenic family, by occasional "entries" at one or other of the four great games. Thus these contests reminded the Greeks of their nationality; and every emotion which the thought of that nationality could excite, at a moment when foreign invasion was threatening it with destruction and calling on all who valued its existence to maintain it against the common foe, was aroused by the recurrence of these festivals in the bosom of a patriotic Greek like Pindar, and finds continual expression in his poetry.

But, quite apart from their antiquarian interest, and the religious and patriotic associations which surrounded them, the great games were in their mere external aspect the most magnificent spectacles known to the Greeks. And on this account alone they might well excite the imagination of a people so keenly alive to all the influences of external pomp and splendour. If we may consider Pindar as at all a typical Greek of his own day, it is clear that magnificence for itself, and irrespective of any further associations connected with it, was to them a source of the keenest admiration and pleasure.

It is true that in Pindar's day the magnificent creations of architecture and sculpture, which at a later period were among the chief glories of Olympia, were mostly yet to come. The colossal ivory statue of Zeus Olympus, the masterpiece of Phidias, and regarded (we are told) less as a statue than as an actual incarnation of Deity, was the work of a later generation, and the temple which was to contain it was as yet incomplete. But what earlier art could do to decorate the place with temples and statues had been done, and its natural features would have been beautiful without the aid of art. Olympia^[13] was a rich and fertile valley bounded on one side by the broad stream of the Alpheus, one of the largest of Grecian rivers, its banks shaded with plane-trees, and its bosom studded with numerous islets. Between Mount Cronius (a conical height covered with pines) and the Alpheus lay the Altis, or sacred grove of Zeus; and, in a grove of olives, from which the victor's crown was cut, on a declivity of Mount Cronius, was the stadium or race-course. Two brooks run down from Cronius to join the Alpheus, and one of them, the Cladeus, formed a boundary of the Altis. Nearly every feature of the scene which modern travellers have noticed, is noticed also in Pindar,—the river, the olive-groves, Mount Cronius and its trees. The place was treeless once, he says, and Cronius a bare and snowy hill, till Heracles brought from the land of the Hyperboreans trees to crown the victors, and shade the concourse of spectators.^[14] Among these groves and streams, for the five days and nights which the festival occupied, lay encamped a multitude from every tribe and colony of Greece, imposing in its mere numbers, and rendered yet more brilliant by the presence of official deputations (called Theoriæ) from the various states, vying with each other in the magnificence of their dress and equipment. The numerous^[15] well-appointed cars, each drawn by four spirited horses, which started together for the chariot-race, must in themselves have been an exciting spectacle. And the athletes in their manly beauty and splendid muscular development provoked enthusiastic demonstrations from the spectators. A midsummer sun beat with only too fierce a radiance upon the scene by day; and at night, from a hundred banquets, songs of triumph and festivity rose into the clear sky illumined by the full orb of the harvest-moon.^[16]

The Olympian games were celebrated at intervals of four years. During the month in which they were held a sacred armistice was proclaimed by heralds throughout Greece. Thus all its various and often discordant tribes, laying aside for a while their mutual animosities, met in peaceful intercourse to swell the gathering at Olympia. As further illustrating the importance of the games in the eyes of Greeks, it may be mentioned that their unfailing occurrence at regular intervals supplied Greek historians with their chief basis of chronological computation. Such and such an event, they would say, happened in the third year of the 80th Olympiad. The contests themselves were by no means the only sources of attraction to the general public. Merchants came to traffic, poets and even prose-authors to recite their compositions before the largest audiences that they could ever hope to address. We are told that Herodotus, "the Father of History," recited his great work to an audience of assembled Greeks at Olympia; and that the young Thucydides, who was present, was inspired by the scene with the first conception of his own yet greater work. "If," says a modern scholar, "we could suppose all the best horse-races, foot-races, prize-fights, and wrestling-matches, all the May meetings and musical festivals, to be fixed for the same place at the same time, and then conceive not merely that the Houses of Parliament should adjourn to attend, but that even in time of war a truce should be proclaimed during their celebration—imagine the assemblage of men of English blood from the furthest corners of the known world, to all of whom, and to their children, the name of the victor in the principal race would form an epoch and a date never to be forgotten, superseding that of the monarch or the president,—if, I say, we can form such a picture as this, we shall have some idea of what the festival of Olympia was to the old Hellenic world."^[17]

The moral and social influences of the great games are dilated upon by Greek rhetoricians in terms which to a modern reader may seem exaggerated, but which, at least, serve to illustrate ancient ideas on the subject.

"The Panegyreis," says one of these authors,^[18] "were an invention and gift of the gods to give men a respite from the weightier cares of life, bestowed—as Plato says—by gods in pity for the toil-worn human race. They were drawn together by men of culture, and established by cities by public agreement on public grounds, to delight and entrance those who attended them." Their founders, adds the same author in another place, "making communities to cease from their wars and their mutual differences, drew them together as it were into a single community, the common country of all, there to meet and sacrifice and revel, forgetting all the troubles of the past."^[19]

Precisely similar is the language of Isocrates. "The founders of the Panegyreis are justly praised for bequeathing to us such a custom. They provided that we should meet together, contracting truces and laying aside our enmities: that we should join in prayers and sacrifices, and thus recall the memory of our common descent, and for the future feel more kindly one towards another; that we should revive old friendships and form new ones; and that neither the general public nor the qualified champions should find their time wasted; but that these gatherings of the Greeks should enable the latter to display their gifts, and the former to gaze upon them as they contend; while neither should lack interest in the occasion, but each have cause for pride,—the spectators in seeing the athletes toiling on their account, the athletes in reflecting that it is themselves that all have come to see."^[20]

The victor in an Olympic competition was mounted upon a tripod of bronze, and crowned with a wreath of olive, cut from the sacred trees with a golden sickle. Public proclamation was made of his name, his parentage, and his native state; and father and fatherland were each esteemed as sharing in the victor's glory. Great was the triumph of a newly-founded city, when for the first time its name was proclaimed by the sacred heralds in the ear of assembled Greece. We may find an instance of this feeling in an Ode of Pindar in honour of the Sicilian Psaumis and his adopted city Camarina.^[21]

"Glory great, O Camarina, brought he to thy peopled town;
Six twin-altars duly decking at the festival most high,
Where, 'mid sacrifice of oxen, in the five days' contests vie
Car and mule and flying courser; and his triumph brought thee fame,
For thy new town's praises mingled with his father Acre's name."

When Xerxes, as has been already mentioned, began his march into Bœotia, and heard from the Arcadian spies that the Greeks were occupied at that supreme moment with the mimic contests of Olympia, he asked for what prize they strove? "A crown of olive." "Heavens!" cried a cousin of the king, "what kind of men have we come to do battle with?—men who contend not for gain, but for glory!" We have seen that substantial rewards were sometimes bestowed by Greek cities on their victorious citizens, but glory was in truth the conqueror's most sufficient and usually his only recompense. Crowned with his olive, and escorted by his rejoicing friends, who chanted usually as they went the time-honoured verses of Archilochus,—preluding, as it were, the hymns in which living poets would soon be called upon to celebrate the triumph—

"Archilochus's threefold lay,
In Olympia sounded forth, the swelling triumph-song,"^[22]—

the victor passed by the hill of Cronus, offered his sacrifices and thanksgivings to Olympian Zeus, and returned to banquet with his friends, and listen to the joyous strains, lasting far into the night, in which the "Comus" or chorus of revellers

"Fought all his battles o'er again."

His return to his native city was a repetition of his triumph. The whole town poured out to meet him. Ælian, in one of his lively little anecdotes, describes the triumphal progress into Athens of the returned Olympian victor Dioxippus. The champion drives into the city, "as is customary with the athletes." The crowds come flocking together,—"from this side and from that, folks joined the procession and gazed upon the sight." Among the rest, braving the oriental prejudices which, as a rule, kept Greek women secluded within the precincts of the Gynæceum or Harem, comes a lady of surpassing beauty—such beauty that the haughty hero starts, flushes, and again grows pale, turns to look, and remains transfixed, forgetful of himself, of the crowd, of everything but his charmer. The spectators exchange meaning glances, and the old cynic Diogenes of Sinope growls out a jest at the expense of "your mighty athlete," who has met his match in "a chit of a girl!"^[23]

Further commemorations of his triumph yet awaited the returned conqueror. The tutelar deities of his city were still to be thanked for the favour to which his piety attributed some portion at least of his success. And by this time the poet, who had been commissioned to prepare a worthier record of the victory than the antiquated hymn of Archilochus, had prepared his ode and trained his chorus. Again, then, the victor and his friends visited in proud procession the altars of his religion, and again his exploits were chanted in notes of solemn joy. Nor was this the end. At family festivals, for years to come, the tale of triumph was told again. And if, in course of time, the victor rose to positions of dignity and power in his native state, the hymns which accompanied his installation dwelt once more on his athletic successes. Many of Pindar's Odes were composed and performed long after the victories they celebrate. And his poem^[24] for the installation of Aristagoras as chief magistrate of Tenedos owes its preservation to the numerous records which it contains of his victories in youthful competitions, and which led the grammarians of Alexandria to class it, wrongly yet fortunately, among the Nemean Odes.

The special features in which the other great games differed from those of Olympia need not detain us long. The Pythian contests were held in the plains of Crissa, under the shadow of the towering crag of Delphi, the centre or "navel" of earth, as Greek poets described it. Here was the world-renowned temple and oracle of Apollo, the especial god of the Dorian race, and the patron of music and the arts. This fact may serve to explain the chief peculiarity of the Pythian games, the musical and poetical contests, which here accompanied the equestrian and gymnastic competitions. A single Ode of Pindar's recalls this feature in the games of Pytho,—that in which he commemorates the victory of the Agrigentine Midas, victor in the competition of flute-players. Its brevity renders it suitable for quotation, and it introduces the remarkable legend of the invention of the flute, suggested to Athene (as tradition told) by the dying shrieks of the Gorgon! For the credit of Greek music, we must hope that the inventress improved upon her model, or that Midas's performance had not too slavishly reproduced it

 

PYTHIAN XII.

TO MIDAS OF ACRAGAS, WINNER OF THE PRIZE FOR FLUTE-PLAYING.

 

Strophe.

"I pray thee, Queen of splendour, city of peerless grace,
Persephone's home; O thou, that on thy tower-clad hill
Dwellest, fair Queen, beside the streams of pastoral Acragas!
Propitious greet, with favour of Heaven and man's goodwill,
The crown, at Pytho's festival that glorious Midas won;
And welcome him, victorious in that fair art,—of old
That Pallas found, when wailed the Gorgons bold,
And she to music wove their dismal moan.

 

Antistrophe.

For maiden-shrieks and hiss of horrible snakes she heard,
Forth flowing in plaintive strain with weary anguish fraught;
What time as Perseus did to death that sister-triad's third,
And ruin to the hosts of Seriphos' island brought;
And blindness therewithal he poured on Phorcus' immortal race;
And Polydectes rued the gift, the son of Danae gave
To him, perforce that made her wife and slave;
When headless lay Medusa fair of face,

 

Strophe.

Slain by the hero, sprung, they say, from a golden rain!
But, when from his peril she had saved her champion dear,
Maiden Athene fashioned then the flute with its varied strain,
To echo back the wailing that smote upon her ear,
As clamorously forth from fell Euryale's maw it came.
So found the goddess,—and forthwith on mortal man bestowed,
And named the strain her 'many-headed mode;'
Memorial fair of each frequented game!

 

Antistrophe.

Through slender brass it flows; through many a reeden quill,
That grew by the Graces' town for choral dance renowned,
In nymph Cephisis' hallowed haunts; true witness of dancers' skill!
Ne'er, save by toiling, mortal aught of bliss hath found;
But all that lacks, in one brief day, can Destiny's power supply.
What fate ordains may none avoid: needs must a day befall
Of chances unforeseen, that, maugre all
Man's scheming, part will grant and part deny!"

The poem has no Epodes, showing that it was intended to be sung by a procession without the usual halts. The prize of the Pythia was a crown of laurel, the especial emblem of Apollo, recalling the legend so beautifully told by Wordsworth:—

"'Tis sung in ancient minstrelsy,
That Phœbus wont to wear
The leaves of any pleasant tree
Around his golden hair;
Till Daphne, desperate with pursuit
Of his imperious love,
At her own prayer transformed took root,
A laurel in the grove.

Then did the Penitent adorn
His brow with laurel green;
And 'mid his bright locks, never shorn,
No meaner leaf was seen;
And poets sage, through every age,
About their temples wound
The bay; and conquerors thanked the gods,
With laurel chaplets crowned."

The Nemean festival was held every other year in a glen or plateau surrounded by the mountains of Argolis—"bleak, grey, barren hills, worn by the winter torrents into a thousand furrows" ^[25]—a very different scene from the groves and tufted hills of Olympia. Rivulets without number course down the hills, and fall into the river Nemea. The most prominent feature in the landscape must always have been the singular "table-mountain" now known as Mount Phouka, a huge pyramidal mass, truncated, yet still overtopping all the surrounding heights. Of this mountain, however, Pindar tells us nothing. The legends of Nemea seem to impress him more than its scenery, though he notices the glen bosomed deep in hills, and its wealth of streams and water-courses. Amid the heath and grasses of this glen had ranged, in the old heroic days, the fearful lion of Nemea, slain at last by Heracles, and furnishing him with the lion-skin which was his traditional costume. The "glen," or the "brake of the lion," is Pindar's favourite periphrasis for Nemea. Its sports were frequented, it would seem, especially by athletes from the neighbouring island of Ægina. A voyage of from one to two hours in fair weather would bring them to the port of Epidaurus, and thence by a steep ascent they climbed to the scene of the contests. Six out of the eight Odes which Pindar devotes to victories at Nemea, describe the successes of Æginetan champions. There are eleven so-called Nemean Odes, but two refer to victories gained in other contests, and one (as we have seen) is an Installation-ode, improperly classed among the Epinicia. Neither olive nor laurel graced the stadium of Nemea. There was, indeed, a grove of sacred cypresses round the temple of Nemean Zeus, three of whose singularly lofty Doric columns still remain as a puzzle to archæologists. But the victor's crown was not gathered from these ill-omened trees. It was supplied by the wild parsley, which still abounds in the locality.

The last of the four great games were the Isthmia, celebrated in alternate years with the Nemea, on the "sea-severing ridge"^[26] of the Corinthian Isthmus, and appropriately dedicated to the sea-god Poseidon. The site of his temple is believed to be still marked by some very ancient Doric and Ionic ruined columns, "akin," as a modern traveller tells us, "rather to old Sicilian than to Attic or Æginetan architecture." The wreath was of pine, according to most authorities; yet here, too, as at Nemea, the victors in the chariot-race seem to have been sometimes at least crowned with parsley.^[27] To this crown, whether of pine or parsley, St Paul refers, as is well known, when he reminds the Corinthians of the exertions of athletes in those Isthmian contests, at which some of his hearers may have themselves competed, and which all must have often witnessed. "Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible." May not some recollection of these, his own words, have lived still in his mind when he wrote from Rome to Timothy, "I have fought the good fight;" or more literally, "I have striven in the glorious contest, I have finished the race; . . . henceforth there is laid up for me the wreath of righteousness, which the Lord, the just judge, will award me in that day"?

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1. Villemain, Essais sur la Génie de Pindare, &c., chap. x.
2. See Carlyle's Frederick the Great, book xxi. chap. v.
3. Grote's Hist. of Greece, Part II., chap. xi.
4. Pyth. viii. 26.
5. Isthm. iii. 14.
6. Nem. xi. 33.
7. Pyth. v. 1.
8. Ol. ii. 53.
9. Isthm. i. 67.
10. Ol. xi. 25.
11. Odes, I. i. 6.
12. Ol. iii. 6.
13. Wordsworth's Greece, p. 386, &c.
14. Ol. iii. 18.
15. We hear, at Pytho, of a race in which forty cars were upset. Such a scene imagination wellnigh refuses to picture. Pyth. v. 49.
16. Ol. xi. 75; iii. 20.
17. W. G. Clark, Peloponnesus.
18. Dionys. Halic. Techn. Rhet. c. i.
19. Dionys. Halic. Techn. Rhet. c. vii.
20. Isocr. Paneg. 44.
21. Ol. v. 4.
22. Ol. ix. 1.
23. Var. Hist. xii. 58.
24. Nem. xi.
25. Clark's Peloponnesus, p. 65.
26. Isthm. i. 9.
27. ib. ii. 16.