d to write were of the
class which we still possess, triumphal odes for victories in those
great games which drew to them all men of Hellenic blood at the feet
of common deities, and which with each recurring festival could even
hush the clamour of war in an imperious Truce of God--such a calling
and such associations must have cherished in him the passion for
Panhellenic brotherhood and unanimity, even had there not been much
else both within and without him to join to the same generous end. It
was the time when Panhellenic feeling was probably stronger than ever
before or after. Before, the states had been occupied in building
up their own polities independently; the Hellenic activity had been
dispersing itself centrifugally among the trans-marine colonies,
and those of Italy and Sicily seemed at one time to make it doubtful
whether the nucleus of civilization were to be there or in the
mother-country. But by the time of the Persian war the best energies
of the race had concentrated themselves between the Aegean and Ionian
seas; and the supreme danger of the war had bound the states together
against the common enemy and taught them to forget smaller differences
in the great strife between Hellene and barbarian. Yet again when that
supreme danger was past the old quarrels arose anew more deadly and
more complicated: instead of a Persian there was a Peloponnesian war,
and the Peloponnesian war in its latter stages came, by virtue of the
political principles involved, to partake much of the character of
a civil war. But the time of Pindar, of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, of
Pheidias, of Polygnotos, was that happy interval when Hellas had
beaten off the barbarian from her throat and had not yet murdered
herself. And Pindar's imagination and generosity were both kindled by
the moment; there was no room in his mind for border squabbles, for
commercial jealousies, for oligarchic or democratic envy: these things
were overridden by a sentiment of nationality wanting indeed in
many circumstances which modern nationalities deem essential to the
existence of such sentiment, and many of which are really essential to
its permanence--yet a sentiment which no other nation ever before or
since can have possessed in the peculiar lustre which it then wore in
Hellas; for no other nation has ever before or since known what it was
to stand alone immeasurably advanced at the head of the civilization
of the world.

Pindar was of a noble family,