Pirna

“ Then Finn flung back his cloak of wild boars’ skins, and holding his father’s treasure-bag in his hand before them all, cried in a loud voice:
“I am Finn, the son of Cool, the son of Trenmor, the son of Basna; I am he whom the sons of Morna have been seeking to destroy from the time that I was born; and here to-night, O King of the Kings of Erin, I claim the fulfilment of thy promise, and the restoration of my inheritance, which [Pg 11] is the Fian leadership of Fail.” Thereupon Gaul mac Morna put his right hand into Finn’s, and became his man. ”

“ But alas! the thought of his charge caused Piran many an anxious hour, for greatly he feared that strife and disaster would come unto Turan through him, yet on account of the promise of protection given unto Siawush, his friend, whom he had led to put his trust in Afrasiab, he felt bound in honor to preserve the child at any cost.
Now when some time had passed, the shepherds came unto their patron, the great Piran-Wisa, saying:
“Verily, Sire, no longer can we restrain the bold young eagle that thou hast placed in our mountain eyrie, for behold! he ever seeketh to fly unto the sun.” ”

“ Pindar begins this ode with a beautiful and poetical invocation to the lyre, expatiating on its powerful effects on gods and men.—The impious alone are incapable of enjoying its sweetness: among which number is Typhœus, who is described with great sublimity, as struggling under the superincumbent weight of Ætna.—This digression leads to the mention of the town built by Hiero at the foot of the mountain, and named from it.—Of this city he had caused himself to be proclaimed a citizen by the herald, who declared him victorious in the Pythian chariot race. ”

“ The admonitions which Pindar addresses to Hiero are to cultivate a calm serenity of mind, after the cares and toils by which he had founded and extended his empire, and to purify and ennoble by poetry a spirit which had been ruffled by unworthy passions. Even when the skill of the victor is put in the foreground, Pindar in general does not content himself with celebrating this bodily prowess alone, but he usually adds some moral virtue which the victor has shown, or which he recommends and extols. ”

“ Pindar was of a noble family, of the house of the Aigeidai, and it is probable that his kinsmen, or some of them, may have taken the side of oligarchy in the often recurring dissensions at Thebes, but of this we know nothing certain. He himself seems to have taken no part in politics. When he speaks on the subject in his odes it is not with the voice of a partizan. An ochlocracy is hateful to him, but if he shows himself an 'aristocrat' it is in the literal and etymological meaning of the word. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ I have ventured to call Pindar the most genuine of the early Greek poets; and in the sense, that his extant works have come down to us on the whole less tampered with and less modernised than any others, I think this is true. In reading Pindar, we feel a well-founded confidence that we have before us the very words of one who lived at a known time and place. In Pindar too we have a poet sui generis. Standing widely apart from,—we can hardly say between,—the epic on one side and the dramatic on the other,—the lyric poetry of Pindar has the impress of a peculiar and quite unique genius. ”

“ Yet Pindar's warnings are conveyed with such tact that the Ode never ceases to seem an encomium. He dwells on the innate nobility of Hiero's character, and he urges the king to escape his temptations, not by becoming better, but by being what he is:—
"Learn thy true self, and live it!"
Flattery and evil counsels, he hints, are putting Hiero into a false position. Let him be himself, and no further reformation will be needed. Was ever an unpalatable warning conveyed with more consummate tact? The very reproach assumes the guise of a compliment. The censor is at the same time a panegyrist. ”

“ Piran's millstone bore him safely across the Atlantic waves until at length—on the fifth day of March—it grounded gently upon the Cornish coast, between Newquay and Perranporth, on that glorious stretch of sand known to-day as Perran Beach. Here the Saint landed, and, taking his millstone with him, proceeded a little distance inland and set himself to work to convert the heathen Cornish to Christianity.
He built himself a little chapel in the sands and lived a useful and pious life for many years, loved by his people, until at last, at the great age of two hundred and six, he died. ”

“ In the time of Finn no one was ever permitted to be one of the Fianna of Erin unless he could pass through many severe tests of his worthiness. He must be versed in the Twelve Books of Poetry, and must himself be skilled to make verse in the rime and metre of the masters of Gaelic poesy. Then he was buried to his middle in the earth, and must, with a shield and a hazel stick, there defend himself against nine warriors casting spears at him, and if he were wounded he was not accepted. ”

“ There too we find mention of the "Sparti," the warrior-race who sprang from the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus, first founder of the city, and from whom sundry Theban families in Pindar's own day claimed descent. The closing scene of the Argive war, the repulse of Adrastus from before the walls of Thebes, is not forgotten: and the list closes with the legend of Pindar's own ancestors, the Ægids, who helped to found the Dorian sovereignty in Sparta.
References to this series of legends abound in our poet, but they are by no means confined to the Odes addressed to Theban conquerors. ”

“ Had it been otherwise how passionately pure would Pindar's joy have uttered itself when the 'stone of Tantalos' that hung over the head of Hellas was smitten into dust in that greatest crisis of the fortunes of humanity. He exults nobly as it is, he does all honour to Athens, 'bulwark of Hellas,' but the shame of his own city, his 'mother' Thebes, must have caused him a pang as bitter as a great soul has ever borne. ”

“ When Pindar depreciates the singer who is a mere pupil of others; when he says that "one training will not form us all," or lift the uninspired man to the heights of poetry; may he not be hinting that the young Bacchylides—a new competitor for Sicilian laurels—was only a feeble echo of Simonides? In an ode written for Hiero in 474 B.C. Pindar expresses the hope of "surpassing rivals" (ἀμεύσασθ' ἀντίους, Pyth. i. 45) : he touches on the baneful power of envy and slander,—but adds, "yet forego not noble aims ”

“ In his isolation and elevation Pindar stands like some fabled heaven-aspiring peak, conspicuous from afar, girdled at the base with ice and snow, beaten by winds, wreathed round with steam and vapor, jutting a sharp and dazzling outline into cold blue ether. Few things that have life dare to visit him at his grand altitude. Glorious with sunlight and with stars, touched by rise and set of day with splendor, he shines when other lesser heights are dulled. ”

“ In this ode Pindar, who, together with other bards, was probably at this time a guest at the royal table, sets forth in a beautiful strain of poetry the glory and superiority of the Olympic contest, in which Hiero has been victorious, to all other games; he then digresses to the history of Pelops, son of Tantalus, who formerly possessed Pisa and Olympia, and is now honoured as a hero within the sacred grove Altis. Returning to his principal subject, he concludes the ode with good wishes for the continued prosperity of the victor. ”

“ It is easy for a fool to shake the stability of a city; but it is hard to place it again on its foundations, unless a god direct the rulers. Gratitude for these good deeds is already in store for thee. Deign therefore to bestow all thy care upon the wealthy Cyrene [10] ."
Thus lofty and dignified was the position which Pindar assumed with regard to these princes; and he remained true to the principle which he so frequently proclaims, that frankness and sincerity are always laudable. But his intercourse with the princes of his time appears to have been limited to poetry. ”

“ The real occasion for the introduction of the myth is the family history of the patron.
Yet again, in the Eleventh Pythian, Pindar has occasion to tell the famous tale of Agamemnon's murder by his wife, probably, as Boeckh argues at length, in connection with a misfortune which had befallen the victor's family. But how does he introduce it? Does he condole plainly with his patron, and pass by obvious steps to compare the present disaster with its legendary parallel? Far from it. Pindar disdains to tread such "beaten paths." ”

“ The north winds, which the pine cone says so shake the heads of the fir-trees in his country, never trouble anything in mine. The snow never lay on the glossy leaves of my parent oak. But no Norrska lived there; or if there did, I never knew her. Nobody came near us, unless a stray peasant now and then passed through. And when I was cut down, I was packed up and shipped off to England, and shifted from hand to hand, till John Krinken took it into his head, years ago, to make a sort of cork jacket of me, with one or two of my companions ”

“ This couch was fit for a princess, and a princess Finola was, though she did not know it herself.
Outside the hut the bare, brown, lonely moor stretched for miles on every side, but towards the east it was bounded by a range of mountains that looked to Finola blue in the daytime, but which put on a hundred changing colors as the sun went down. Nowhere was a house to be seen, nor a tree, nor a flower, nor sign of any living thing. From morning till night, nor hum of bee, nor song of bird, nor voice of man, nor any sound fell on Finola's ear. ”

“ In Pindar, passing from Ibycus and Anacreon, we ascend at once into a purer and more healthful atmosphere, fraught, indeed, with passion and pregnant with storm, but no longer simply sensual. Taken as a whole, the Odes of Pindar, composed for the most part in the honour of young men and boys, both beautiful and strong, are the work of a great moralist as well as a great artist. ”

“ But it is not surprising that the poet's caution should have exposed him in some quarters to the charge of servility; or that his mingling of open praise and covert censure should have puzzled later readers, and led them to form strangely different estimates of Hiero's character: some describing him as the ideal king—brave, generous, trustful, and affectionate; while to others he appears as a vulgar tyrant—mean, grasping, and treacherous. A right understanding of Pindar's language presents us with another and probably a truer view. Hiero had great qualities and great faults ”

“ The memory of a fancied kinship had, even in historical times, united Thebes and Ægina more than once in close political alliance. And, in Pindar's favourite legends, members of the heroic Æginetan house of Æacus appeared, again and again, as the chosen friends and comrades of the Theban Heracles.
No less than eleven of Pindar's extant Odes [6] are addressed to Æginetan conquerors. In many of these he expresses what is evidently a warm and sincere admiration for the character of the people and their institutions ”

“ They are addressed, however, not to the victor himself, but to his son Thrasybulus. Pindar dwells warmly on the generous hospitality and kindliness of both father and son, and on the strong affection—honourable to both—which existed between them. In the race which forms the theme of the Sixth Pythian, Thrasybulus seems to have acted as charioteer to his father—and this incident suggests to Pindar the legend of another son who had rendered good service to his father Antilochus, son of the aged Nestor. ”

“ Pindar, however, has undoubtedly much of that sententious wisdom which began to show itself among the Greeks at the time of the Seven Wise Men, and which formed an important element of elegiac and choral lyric poetry before the time of Pindar. The apophthegms of Pindar sometimes assume the form of general maxims, sometimes of direct admonitions to the victor. At other times, when he wishes to impress some principle of morals or prudence upon the victor, he gives it in the form of an opinion entertained by himself: "I like not to keep much riches hoarded in an inner room ”

“ And now at sacred Pytho hath the son of Karneadas wedded that city to the fair flower of good luck: for by his victory there he hath proclaimed Kyrene's name, even her's who shall receive him with glad welcome home, to the country of fair women bringing precious honour out of Delphi.
Great merits stir to many words: yet to be brief and skilful on long themes is a good hearing for bards: for fitness of times is in everything alike of chief import. ”