Pindar (Morice)/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
SICILY.—THE LEGENDS OF OLYMPIA.
It has already been stated that the received classification of Pindar's Odes into the four groups of Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian, gives us little clue to the contents of any particular Ode. Yet the Nemean group, if we exclude from it those Odes which have been wrongly reckoned by grammarians as Nemean—the Ninth, the Tenth, and the Eleventh—exhibits a certain unity of subject. For out of the eight remaining Odes six are devoted to victories of Æginetan athletes, and are mainly occupied with legends of the Æginetan hero Æacus and his family; while a seventh, though written for a Sicilian, dwells chiefly on the tale of Heracles, the friend and comrade of Æacus. In the Isthmian group also, two closely connected sets of legends predominate, the legends of Thebes and Ægina,—sister-states, according to Greek tradition, deriving their origin respectively from Thebe and Ægina, the daughters of Asopus. Seven Isthmian Odes are all that now remain from the original collection of Aristophanes. Three are addressed to Thebans, three to Æginetans, one to a Sicilian (and in this last the mythical element is insignificant). No such unity can be said to characterise the Olympian or the Pythian group. In each of these, however, a particular series of legends stands prominently forward in neither case, indeed, occupying the whole or nearly the whole of the book, but in each case extending through several Odes of exceptional beauty and importance, and so forming a marked and salient feature. In the Olympian Odes, this prominence belongs to the local legends of Olympia; in the Pythian, to those of the distant colony Cyrenè, and its ruling family the Battiadæ. The legends of Olympia take up three out of the fourteen Olympian Odes, and each of these three is addressed to a victor from the western colonies of Greece in Italy and Sicily. We have already suggested a reason for this circumstance. The great houses of Sicily were greater in the present than in the past, and the poet may probably have felt that, in dwelling upon their magnificent present position and calling attention to the glorious associations of their Olympian victories, he was paying them a more welcome as well as a more sincere compliment, than he could have done by referring to family or national antecedents, which had been eclipsed by more recent glories. Still we must not suppose that all allusion to ancestral legends is excluded from the Odes addressed to Sicilians. The Second Olympian Ode, addressed to Thero of Acragas, or Agrigentum, traces the victor's family back to the great mythical house of the Theban Labdacidæ, and illustrates the vicissitudes of its history by parallels drawn from the varied fortunes of its heroic ancestors. But this is the exception. As a rule, in all the Odes addressed to Sicilian or Italian Greeks, the mythical element is introduced either in connection with the locality or other circumstances of the triumph (Ol. i. iii. iv. xi.; Pyth. xii., and perhaps Nem. i.), or with the personal surroundings or character of the victor (Pyth. i. ii. iii. vi.; Nem. ix.), or is practically absent altogether (Ol. v. x. xii., all very short Odes; Isthm. ii.) The only exceptions are the Ode to Thero already mentioned (Ol. ii.), and the Ode (Ol. vi.) to Agesias of Syracuse, a member of a sacerdotal house, whose peculiar privileges recalled, almost of course, the legend of their supposed ancestor Iamus, and thus enabled Pindar to grace his poem with one of the most exquisite tales in Greek mythology.
Pindar's chief Sicilian patrons belonged to the royal families of Syracuse and Acragas. The regal honours of these families had not been long achieved. About the time of Pindar's boyish studies in Athens, a certain Cleander, despot of Gela in Sicily, had in his army two captains of some distinction, Gelo and Ænesidamus. Cleander was succeeded by a brother, who fell in battle; and Gelo, after some pretence of establishing the late king's sons in their father's place, ultimately succeeded in securing it for himself. Gelo was one of four brothers, the "sons of Deinomenes," and when in B.C. 485 he transferred the seat of his empire from Gela to Syracuse, his brother Hiero succeeded him at Gela. Five years later (B.C. 480) a magnificent victory over the Carthaginians at Himera, coinciding in date with the yet more momentous success of the Greeks over the Persians at Salamis, raised the house of Deinomenes to a height of power at home and consideration abroad that had been attained by no previous Sicilian dynasty. The honours and results of this victory were shared by Thero (a son of Gelo's old comrade Ænesidamus), whom we now find established—how, we know not—as despot of Agrigentum. In two years more Gelo was dead, and Hiero succeeded to the whole of his dominions.
Thero and Hiero, representatives of the two old comrades Gelo and Ænesidamus, reigned pretty peaceably side by side, in Agrigentum and Syracuse respectively, till the death of Thero. At one time a conflict between them seemed imminent, but the danger was averted, and the credit of effecting a reconciliation is ascribed,[1] but on insufficient authority, to Pindar's rival-poet, Simonides. The son and successor, however, of Thero was overthrown by Hiero, who thus became to all intents and purposes supreme in Sicily. Syracuse remained his capital, but he founded also a city called Ætna, from its vicinity to the mountain of that name, and set up in it, as rulers, his son Deinomenes and his friend Chromius, either in conjunction or in succession. Further, on winning a chariot-victory at Pytho, he complimented his new city by associating its name, and not that of Syracuse, with his own, in the customary proclamation of the victor's father and native state.
After the fall of the Theronian dynasty in Agrigentum, two members at least of the deposed family seem to have remained as private persons in that city. These were Xenocrates[2] (a brother of Thero) and his son Thrasybulus. Hiero had married a daughter of Xenocrates, and this may, perhaps, explain the circumstance that they were willing to remain at home in their altered position, and that Hiero permitted them to do so.
Hiero died in B.C. 467, the fifty-fifth year of Pindar's life; and in two years more his dynasty was overthrown, and his kingdom broken up.
Of the persons mentioned in the above brief sketch, Thero, Hiero, Chromius, Xenocrates, and Thrasybulus were patrons of Pindar. For Thero he wrote two Odes (Ol. ii. iii.), for Hiero four (Ol. i.; Pyth. i. ii. iii.), for Chromius two (Nem. i. ix.), for Xenocrates and Thrasybulus two (Pyth. vi.; Isthm. ix.)
After the fall of Hiero's family, its chief adherents gathered anew to re-found the city of Camarina: and for one of these, Psaumis (about B.C. 452), Pindar wrote his two last Odes (Ol. iv. v.)
The other Sicilian or Italian Greeks commemorated by Pindaric Odes were Agesias, an honoured inhabitant of Syracuse in the reign of Hiero (Ol. vi.); Ergoteles of Himera, originally a refugee from Crete, who made Sicily his adopted country (Ol. xii.); Midas, the flute-player of Agrigentum (Pyth. xii.); and a boy named Agesidamus, of the tribe of the Italian or Western Locrians, to whom Pindar addressed two Odes, the first being little more than a promise of the second, which followed at an interval of some years, and opens with an apology for the delay (Ol. x. xi.)
The circumstance that so many of Pindar's Odes were addressed to Sicilians certainly gives a great probability to the traditions of Pindar's sojourn at the court of Hiero. This probability is increased by certain expressions which the poet employs to describe his own relations, especially, with Hiero and Thrasybulus. Towards Xenocrates, again, he employs the language of one who had seen and admired his conduct as a host and as a citizen. His language to Hiero implies a very considerable degree of intimacy, and an acquaintance with his character and the surroundings of his court that could scarcely be derived from mere hearsay. An extremely sharp attack, also, which he makes on some "pair" of rivals (probably Simonides and Bacchylides), seems prompted by the recollection of some unpleasant scene in Thero's palace,—some combination of the "pair" to silence or otherwise put down the Theban poet.[3]
"Vain their lore, base pair! that croak like crows
Bound the heavenly bird of Jove."
Prom another passage it appears that the same or similar influences were at work also against Pindar in Hiero's court, and that Pindar had friends at Syracuse who kept him informed on the subject. "The guile of slanderers," he cries, "is fatal alike to their dupe and their victim!" [4]
"Theirs is the crafty fox's mood;
Yet what, the while, such gainful cunning's gain?
Like loaded nets they drudge beneath the main—
I, the buoyant cork, that rides unscathed above the flood!"
And he adds that he knows his friends and his foes, and will love the one, and dart like a wolf upon the other.
The Third Pythian also expresses a wish to visit Hiero (about B.C. 474), and Boeckh thinks it probable that this wish was carried out next year, and that the First Nemean to Chromius (B.C. 473), the First Olympian to Hiero, and the Twelfth Olympian to Ergoteles (both probably B.C. 472), were composed by Pindar in Sicily.
Yet the external evidence for this visit is extremely slight. The sojourn of Simonides and Bacchylides at Hiero's court is attested on good authority: not so that of Pindar. And it is at least remarkable, though it seems to have escaped the notice of commentators, that Xenophon's imaginary dialogue "Hiero," composed certainly within a century of Pindar's death,[5] and exhibiting the most complete extant picture of the intercourse between Hiero and Simonides, says not a word of any visit to Hiero from Pindar.
The legends of Olympia, which Pindar has introduced into his Odes, comprise (1) the adventures of Pelops; (2) the institution of the contests by Heracles at the tomb of Pelops, the planting and naming of Mount Cronius, and the introduction of the olive-trees which supplied the crown; (3) the first celebration of the Olympic festival, and the winners of its earliest prizes; (4) the transference by Heracles to the Tyndarids, Castor and Polydeuces (or Pollux), of his self-chosen duty of superintending the games, when his own deification removed him to another sphere. These legends are embodied in the First, Third, and Eleventh Olympian Odes, which may now be considered briefly in succession.
The First Olympian Ode was written for Hiero, and commemorates his success in the horse-race with a horse bearing the appropriate name of Pherenicus, or "the victor." It opens with the oft-quoted maxim, "Best is water,"[6] and proceeds at once to the occasion of the Ode. Water is the first of boons, gold the first of treasures, and Olympia the first of festivals. Olympia it is that wakes our lays, as we approach the happy home of Hiero!
Then follows a picture of that home, its magnificence and culture, and an allusion (apparently) to the poet's personal knowledge of it.
"With rod of righteousness the fields he sways
Of pastoral Sicily, and culls the prime
Of virtue, while around him blaze
The brightest flowers of rhyme,
Such festal lays as oft we wake
Around his board."
Then the victorious racer is set before us—
"As by Alphëus' banks he sped.
No need of spur—on, on he flies!
And bears his master toward the prize."
And then an allusion to the glory which this victory has given to Hiero in the Peloponnese, "the isle of Pelops," introduces us at once to the legendary history of that hero.
He was the son of Tantalus, and the favourite of Poseidon the Sea-god. Tantalus, the Lydian king, had enjoyed, but forfeited by some crime, the privilege of an extraordinary intimacy with the gods—he had shared their feasts, and entertained them at his table in return. Yet this favoured prince became at last a terrible monument of divine vengeance. He was sent to join Ixion and Sisyphus in Tartarus, tormented (according to some authors) by immersion in a pool of water, which receded whenever his lips approached it, while fruit just out of reach hung perpetually above his head.[7] Pindar follows a different legend, and imagines a huge stone, ever threatening to fall, poised magically above his head.
And why this change? Legends, or according to Pindar "some envious neighbour," told a hideous tale of a "caldron," in which Tantalus, preparing to feast the gods, had boiled the mangled body of his son. The frightful banquet had begun, when the crime was discovered, and Clotho, the goddess of Pate, drew from the caldron the revivified body of Pelops. One shoulder only was missing—Ceres had unfortunately swallowed it; but the place of the absent limb was ingeniously supplied by one of ivory! And so Tantalus was hurled to his well-merited doom in Tartarus. Pindar will have none of this revolting legend. The crime of Tantalus is transmuted into an unpardonable yet amiable weakness. The food of the gods had given him immortality, and, Prometheus-like, he had bestowed on his fellow-men nectar and ambrosia stolen from the stores of heaven. Hence his punishment, and hence the cessation of the intercourse between his family and the gods. Pelops was sent back to join the fleeting race of men.
He grew up, and sought himself a bride—Hippodameia, daughter of Œnomaüs, king of Pisa. But the lady's hand could only be won by victory in a chariot-race, and the penalty of defeat was death. In his difficulty the lover appealed to Poseidon, and not in vain. At midnight, beside the lonely sea, he called and the god appeared. "Win me this bride, Poseidon! I implore thee by the memory of old affection. Thirteen suitors already hath Œnomaüs slain—it is a fearful peril"—
"Yet direst perils bravest hearts befit.
Die must we all—then why in darkness sit,
Chewing the cud of eld, unknown to fame,
Stranger to all that graces life? No! set am I to dare the strife;
Fulfil thou then my cherished aim!
He spake, nor vainly prayed: Poseidon gave
His golden car, and wingèd coursers brave."
So Œnomaüs and the maiden fell[8] both at once, says Pindar (making one of those audacious puns that so often surprise us in serious Greek poetry)—Œnomaüs fell slain, his daughter fell to the conqueror. Six noble sons she bare him; and now he rests a deified hero, consecrating with his tomb the scene of his successful race. There to this day the noblest of Greece vie in friendly contests, and the victors enjoy for life all bliss that triumphs can bring.
And now a lay for Hiero! wisest and best of men that ever graced a poet's song. Long may he prosper, and earn yet loftier praises. The gifts of men differ—his is kingship, mine is poesy. I may not rival his bliss, but I am content with my own—to associate with victors, and excel all Greeks in song!
So the poem closes.
The Third Olympian Ode is addressed to Thero of Acragas, victor in the chariot-race. It was composed for performance at a feast in Acragas in honour of the great Twin-heroes to whom (as already mentioned) Heracles had bequeathed the superintendence of his games.
These accordingly, with their sister Helen, are invoked at starting, and then the poet passes to the occasion of his Ode—the recent victory at Olympia, which demands his choicest lay for the son of Ænesidamus. Well has Thero earned such praise; the fair award of the "Ætolian arbiter" (i. e., the Eleian[9] judge) has crowned him with the olive that Heracles brought of old from the distant north, the marvellous land of the Hyperboreans, the shady fountains of Ister (the Danube).
He had reared already the altar of his father Zeus, the centre of worship at Olympia; the full harvest moon shone upon the lists; but the "Altis," the sacred grove, was still to come,—the "Stadium," the race-course, still lacked the olives which were to furnish the victor's crown.
"Already, by rocky Alpheus' side, to glorious contests sanctified
Those quinquennial lists were set:—
And Cronian Pelops' dells were treeless yet!
All naked to the scorching sun they lay:
So to Ister's shores he took his way."
He had visited that land before, bearing to Diana the wondrous stag with horns of gold from the jagged Arcadian mountains, whose capture had been one of the Twelve Labours imposed upon him by his harsh kinsman Eurystheus, "a little more than kin and less than kind," and submitted to by the hero in expiation of an involuntary crime. Thither had he come, and gazed entranced on the wondrous trees of the Northern land:—
"And longing seized his soul to deck with these
His twelve-fold course."
With these, then, he returned to Pisa, and surely now too his presence is among us; surely with his successors the Tyndaridæ he comes to share the feast! Gloriously does Thero honour those Tyndaridæ, and gloriously have they rewarded him. What blisses may exist beyond a mortal's reach "I know not, nor I greatly care not" [10]—
"But sure as water knows no peer, and best
Is gold of riches, Thero's deeds have pressed
To fame's last cape! What further lies, is barred alike to fools and wise:—
I will not venture there, else vain were I!"
Thus, having in fancy conducted his patron to the fabled Pillars of Heracles, the limits of the ancient world, which later authors identified with the Straits of Gibraltar, Pindar leaves him to "the contemplation of his own perfections"—not quite a god, but all that man may be.
The Eleventh Olympian Ode is addressed to the boy-wrestler Agesidamus of Western Locris. The poet had been an eyewitness of the victory[11] which it records, and had hastily composed a brief Ode for performance at a banquet immediately following upon the victory. This poem, which figures in our collection as the Tenth Olympian, after an allusion to the circumstances of its production—a timely service rendered at a moment's notice by the bard to his patron,—goes on to promise a future lay more worthy of its occasion, to be sung when Agesidamus reaches his Italian home:—
"If Heaven empower this mortal to unfold
Poesy's bright flowers: and so,
Agesidamus, for thy prowess know—
Son of Archestratus—my songs anew
Shall gild your golden bays,
And bring the clans of Western Locrians praise."
And the Ode closes with a tribute to the chivalry and culture of these Locrians, ingrained in them as cunning is in foxes, or courage in lions.
Of that promise the Eleventh Ode was the fulfilment, but it had been so long delayed as to suggest the need of an apology. "Forgive me! I had forgotten my debt, but now it shall be paid with usury."
Then the poet affects a hesitation. So many themes crowd in upon his fancy: which shall he choose? Shall he dwell on the culture and prowess of the Locrians? or on their national legends—the hero Cycnus who had dared to encounter Heracles? or on the merits of Agesidamus's trainer Ilas, the Achilles to this young Patroclus, whose instruction had developed natural gifts without which all teaching would have been vain? At last a theme is chosen, on which Pindar had doubtless resolved from the first, the legend of the first Olympian festival.
Rapidly the war of Heracles against the Epeian monarch Augeas is sketched. The king was slain; his city sacked; and from its spoils, collected in Pisa, the cost of the first "Olympia" was defrayed. Then it was that the "Hill of Cronus," a nameless snowy summit in the olden days of Œnomaüs and Pelops, received its well-known name. The lists were set, and the first Olympian victors received their prizes. And who were these? A catalogue is given, with all due detail:—
"In the stadium best, to the goal that pressed,
Thy son, Licymnius! showed his speed,
Œonus, leader of Midea's host: Tegea of Echemus made her boast
In wrestling famed: and the boxer's meed
To Tiryns town Doryclus bore:
Mantinean Samus with coursers four
In the chariots won—Halirothius' son:
And all unerring flew Phrastor's spear:
With strength unrivalled Eniceus flung the massy stone in his grasp that swung,
And loud and long was his comrades' cheer!"
A tedious list to us, perhaps,—but who can tell what associations it suggested to Pindar's audience?
Then the fair moon rose on the scene, and revelry succeeded to the contests:—
"And straight around rang from each banquet sweet
Such songs as yet the victors greet."
"We too, in our later days, will raise that strain, and sing of Zeus and of victory. Long have we delayed, but our lay will be all the more welcome, when at last from its Theban fount it reaches the Locrian land. Hope deferred only heightens the joy of the aged father when at last the long-expected heir is born. So will it be with our song, long promised, long withheld."
"With eager joy the glorious house I greet!
Watering with dews of honey sweet
The Locrians' well-peopled state, thy noble son I celebrate,
Archestratus,—as erst I saw him gain
Victory by Olympia's fane
On that auspicious day,
In form and feature fair,
Blent with such youthful bloom, as drove decay
Far from Ganymede, and brought him heavenly life with Zeus to share."
No such thread of a common legend as we have traced in the above Odes unites the remaining poems of the Olympian group. Thus the Eighth, addressed to an Æginetan, deals with legends which form the staple of the Nemean Odes. Four other important Olympian Odes respectively introduce us to the mythical annals of Arcadia, Rhodes, Corinth, and Northern Greece; but these must be reserved for future consideration, and the present chapter may close with a notice of four short Odes addressed to conquerors at Olympia,—mere trifles as compared with Pindar's greatest poems, yet trifles which, like the sketches of a Dürer or a Michelangelo, exhibit in their every line the hand of a master.
The Fourth and Fifth Olympian Odes were written to commemorate a single victory, that of Psaumis of Camarina in the race of mule-cars. The fourth appears to have been sung on the evening of the race by the band of revellers who escorted Psaumis to offer his thanks at the altar of Olympian Zeus. The fifth was performed after the conqueror's return home in solemn procession to the shrine of his city's local patroness, the Nymph Camarina, whom the poet invokes as a daughter of Ocean.
The first of these two little poems (Ol. iv.) contains one of Pindar's most audacious metaphors. He wishes to convey in a single word a picture of the doomed giant Typho writhing in unavailing struggles beneath the roots of Ætna, pinioned and crushed by the huge mass that soars above him. Now in the species of mouse-trap which Greek householders favoured, it was provided that a heavy piece of wood called the "ipos" or "press" should drop upon the rash intruder. Wherefore Pindar, scorning to beat about the bush with explanation or apology for the phrase, calls Ætna outright—
"The wind-swept press of Typho."
Psaumis was an elderly man, and his appearance in the lists seems to have provoked irreverent jokes in some quarters. But Pindar soothes his patron, and shames the levity of the jesters, by recalling the myth of another grey-haired champion, the hero-son of Clymenus. He too had been scorned by his rivals; but he recked little for their scorn when he took his prize from the fair hands of Queen Hypsipylè, and read a lesson to his detractors:—
"Such is my speed! And know
My hands too, and heart are so!
On heads that have not passed their prime,
Locks of grey full often grow,
Ere the appointed time!"
Camarina, it will be remembered, had lately been repeopled by the expelled adherents of Hiero's dynasty at Syracuse (B.C. 461); thus, then, in the Fifth Ode, Pindar describes the new houses rising on the banks of the Hipparis, and constructed of logs brought downstream from the interior. The river-god, says the poet, builds and blesses the city—
"Hipparis, that waters all thy host with honoured urns,
Gathering a stately forest round his banks of storied homes,—
Guided of whose grace thy people fast from dearth to glory comes!"
Thus the alchemy of song transmutes the rough log-huts of the new settlement into a stately forest, with a god to plant it, to water it, and to give it increase.
The Ode for Ergoteles of Himera, victor in the long-race (Ol. xii.), stands in one respect alone among the compositions of Pindar. It is from first to last the expression of a single thought—"Inscrutable are the ways of Providence."
Civil strife had driven Ergoteles from his native Cretan city. But this seeming misfortune, says the poet, has proved a blessing in disguise. Had he remained at home in Crete—
"Cooped like a cock from foes beyond its pen"—
he would have frittered away in petty insular competitions the gift of speed which, under more favourable auspices, has ripened into victory at Olympia, Pytho, and the Isthmus. Yet who could have foreseen such a result of exile? How little men know of their real good! Verily, "a man cannot tell what shall be."
This one thought underlies the whole Ode. It opens with an invocation of Fortune, the saviour-goddess, piloting ships at sea, wars and councils by land. This leads to a fine description of the vanity of human expectations, and the fortunes of Ergoteles are used to point the moral of the poem.
Very graceful and pleasing is the little Ode (Ol. xiv.) in honour of the boy-racer Asopichus of Orchomenus, in Bœotia. Pindar, when it pleased him, could touch a theme as lightly and daintily as Horace himself. As the old Greek scholiast remarked, when he reached at last an easy passage in his Thucydides, "Here the lion smiled!" It is occupied chiefly with an invocation of the Graces—the three sister-deities, Joy, Brightness, and Song; and then at its close, with a charming touch of natural feeling, the orphan-boy is reminded of his lost father, and Echo or Rumour is summoned to bear to the dead Cleudamus the tidings of his son's success:—
"How by the glens of glorious Pisa he
Crowned his young locks with plumes of victory."
Similarly in another Ode,[12] the victory of the Æginetan boy, Alcimedon, is described as the theme of mutual congratulations among deceased members of his house in Hades:—
"Iphion (by Rumour, Hermes' daughter, taught)
Shall to Callimachus repeat, what pride
Zeus in Olympia to their house hath brought."
Thus, with a simple and cheerful faith, Pindar enforces that creed which Aristotle tells us it would be "too unkind" to reject, that "the good fortunes of kinsmen count for something to the dead."
- ↑ Scholiast on Pindar, Ol. ii. 29.
- ↑ It is possible, however, that Xenocrates died before the fall of the dynasty.
- ↑ Ol. ii. 87.
- ↑ Pyth. ii. 76.
- ↑ Xenophon can hardly have been born later than B.C. 442, the supposed year of Pindar's death.
- ↑ Repeated in Ol. iii. 44.
- ↑ Hence our word "to tantalise."
- ↑ Literally, "he took (i.e., slew) Œnomaüs, and (took) the maid to wife."
- ↑ The Eleians, who in Pindar's day regulated the contests, were regarded as immigrants from Ætolia.
- ↑ Shakespeare, Richard II.
- ↑ Cf. line 100 of the Ode.
- ↑ Ol. viii. 81.