y, and who rejoiced in a poet with whom they could
live on such easy terms.

Another prominent trait in the style of Bacchylides is his love of
picturesque detail. This characteristic marks the fragment by which, before
the discovery of the 1896 MS., he was best known--a passage, from one of
his paeans, on the blessings of peace (fr. 13, Bergk, 3, Jebb); and it
frequently appears in the Odes, especially in the mythical narratives.
Greater poets can make an image flash upon the mind, as Pindar sometimes
does, by a magic phrase, or by throwing one or two salient points into
strong relief. The method of Bacchylides is usually quieter; he paints
cabinet pictures. Observation and elegance do more for him than grasp or
piercing insight; but his work is often of very high excellence in its own
kind. His treatment of simile is only a special phase of this general
tendency. It is exemplified by the touches with which he elaborates the
simile of the eagle in Ode v., and that of the storm-tossed mariners in Ode
xii. This full development of simile is Homeric in manner, but not Homeric
in motive: Homer's aim is vividness; Bacchylides is rather intent on the
decorative value of the details themselves. There are occasional flashes of
brilliancy in his imagery, when it is lit up by his keen sense of beauty or
splendour in external nature. A radiance, "as of fire," streams from the
forms of the Nereids (xvi. 103 ff.). An athlete shines out among his
fellows like "the bright moon of the mid-month night" among the stars
(viii. 27 ff.). The sudden gleam of hope which comes to the Trojans by the
withdrawal of Achilles is like a ray of sunshine "from beneath the edge of
a storm-cloud" (xii. 105 ff.). The shades of the departed, as seen by
Heracles on the banks of the Cocytus, are compared to the countless leaves
fluttering in the wind on "the gleaming headlands of Ida" (v. 65 ff.)--an
image not unworthy of Dante or of Milton.

Among the minor features of this poet's style the most remarkable is his
use of epithets. A god or goddess nearly always receives some ornamental
epithet; sometimes, indeed, two or even three (_e.g._ [Greek:
kalukostephanou semnas ... Artemidos leukolenou], v. 98 f.). Such a trait
is in unison with the epic manner, the straightforward narrative, which we
find in some of the larger poems (as in v., x., and xvi.). On the other
hand, the copious use of such ornament has the disadvantage that it
sometimes gives a tinge of