reduced, will always in some degree exist: we shall always
wish that he was easier to construe, that his allusions to things
unfamiliar and sometimes undiscoverable to us were less frequent, that
family pride had not made it customary for him to spend so many lines
on an enumeration of prizes won elsewhere and at other times by the
victor of the occasion or by his kin. Such drawbacks can only fall
into insignificance when eclipsed by consideration of the far more
than counterbalancing attractions of the poems, of their unique and
surpassing interest, poetical, historical, and moral.

Of Pindar as a poet it is hard indeed to speak adequately, and
almost as hard to speak briefly, for a discussion of his poetical
characteristics once begun may wander far before even a small part
has been said of what might be. To say that to his poetry in supreme
degree belong the qualities of force, of vividness, often of
impressive weight, of a lofty style, seeming to be the expression of
a like personality, of a mastery of rhythm and metre and imaginative
diction, of a profoundly Hellenic spirit modified by an unmistakable
individuality, above all of a certain sweep and swiftness as of the
flight of an eagle's wing--to say all this would be to suggest some of
the most obvious features of these triumphal odes; and each of these
qualities, and many more requiring exacter delineation, might be
illustrated with numberless instances which even in the faint image
of a translation would furnish ample testimony[2]. But as this
introduction is intended for those who purpose reading Pindar's
poetry, or at any rate the present translation of it, for themselves,
I will leave it to them to discover for themselves the qualities which
have given Pindar his high place among poets, and will pass on to
suggest briefly his claims to interest us by reason of his place in
the history of human action and human thought.

We know very little of Pindar's life. He was born in or about the year
B.C. 522, at the village of Kynoskephalai near Thebes. He was thus a
citizen of Thebes and seems to have always had his home there. But he
travelled among other states, many of which have been glorified by his
art. For his praise of Athens, 'bulwark of Hellas,' the city which at
Artemision 'laid the foundation of freedom,' the Thebans are said to
have fined him; but the generous Athenians paid the fine, made him
their Proxenos, and erected his statue at the public cost