Olympian Racing Calendar might have furnished to us. But the poet would have passed in fancy to the halls of Knowsley, the bells of proud Preston ringing in honour of the conqueror, the associations and history of the old town and the delight of its Lancashire lads and lasses. Then he would have roved over the history of the house: the siege of Lathom and the lion heart of Countess Charlotte, the Stanley who gave his blood for his king on the scaffold, and him whose battlecry rang at Flodden, the game played for England's crown at Bosworth, and far back to the old-world story of the eagle and child, now almost forgotten even among the most curious in Lancashire folklore. And again-for Pindar's heart is always in strong sympathy with his own times-he would render his meed of graceful praise (which, Laureate as he was, never becomes flattery in his mouth) for the zeal which wrought so well in the dark days of Lancashire famine, and would roll forth wise lessons in majestic words on the duties and responsibilities which belong to the lot of a territorial magnate. And then, with one of those rapid transitions which abound in his odes, he would touch on some political question of the day, and plead in grave and measured phrase on behalf of some cause concerning justice or reason. Perhaps also, for Pindar is among the most religious spirits of antiquity, he would have had something to say about the championship of our old Church constitution and of the venerable traditions associated therewith. And this would lead him to some of those deep and solemn thoughts which at times glow through his musicthoughts of the right relations between man and the Divine Power, those thoughts which haunted the wisest and purest minds of heathenism with a feverish longing which would not be satisfied and which

became a sort of agony in its intenseness-such thoughts as we only read in Pindar and Eschylus and Plato.

Thus the Swan of Dirce rises for us into a far higher interest than could have attached to any pictures, however animated and however graphic, of the flying horses by Alpheus' side, of the muscular athletes and the shouting multitudes. To the Greek his Olympian and Isthmian games imported a vast deal more than the Derby Day does to the population of London. The Olympian festival was, in the first place, a high religious celebration especially dedicated to the service of Zeus himself. Its legendary history was further associated with the achievements of Hercules, the chosen hero of Greek mythology, ever ready when a wrong was to be redressed or а monster smitten down. But it had a strong significance for later times too, inasmuch as it constituted the bond of union between the restlessly jarring states of ancient Greece, reminding them at once of their common race and of the gods of their common worship. Separated by broad seas, engaged perhaps in mutual war, the various nations met for common worship and common enjoyment before the old sanctuary on the banks of the Alpheus. The season of the Olympic games brought with it something more than an armistice for belligerents of the Hellenic race. The savagery of that old warfarethe fierceness of men who butchered their prisoners of war in cold blood as the Syracusans butchered the Athenian generals, and who were ready to exterminate a whole people as the Athenians resolved to do in the case of Mitylene-paused here on both sides and left the contending peoples to meet in friendship so far as the purposes of the festival were concerned. All that they recollected for the time was that they all came of the same race and all

adored the same Zeus. The occasion gave some foreshadowing of the religion which should assert for all mankind the brotherhood thus claimed on the score of common Hellenism-under which there should neither be Jew nor Greek. Exalted as this bond of union was by its religious sanction, it could not fail to possess a high importance in the eyes of mere politicians in the Greek states. They saw the need of keeping alive an institution and a principle capable of uniting, when events might call for it, the whole of Greece against a common enemy. Pindar was born, it is true, under circumstances which hardly fitted him to give direct expression to the hopes and claims of Hellenic unity. He was about forty years old when those great events occurred which forced the Greeks into combination and made their nationality illustrious-when the Persian king

Sat on the rocky brow
Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis,

nority was recognised at the time; and Pindar may have sympathised rather with these than with the public action of his countrymen. So at least some of the Greeks of a later period tried to make out. There is even a story preserved by Eustathius, to the effect that Pindar's sympathy with Athens, as shown in his poems, gave no small offence to his Theban countrymen, and that they even imposed a fine on him in consequence, which was paid by the Athenians. There does not appear to be any authentic foundation for this story, which certainly savours of a time when the glory of Athens, both in literature and arms, had become prominent in Greek history. There are two or three passages in which Pindar commemorates the service done by Athens to Greek freedom, as in a fragment of his dithyrambs

That fate-favoured town,

Brilliant Athens of high renown, The stay of Greece, the theme of bards the wearer of the violet crown.

of Medes, and Bactrians, and Sacians, and Indians that were assembled to subject Europe to the yoke of Asia. But the Thebans did not stand by the side of Greece in those days. On the contrary, they joined the invaders with considerable readiness, and their troops fought bravely against the Athenians at the bloody battle of Platea, holding their ground long after the rest of Xerxes' army had been driven in disorder from the field, and even gaining at the close of the day an important advantage over a detached portion of the Greek forces. But, as with the Phocians and other states which submitted to Persia, so at Thebes we have ground for believing, there was a minority who desired to side with Greek resistance to the invader. Herodotus speaks of οἱ μηδίζοντες τῶν Onßaior, implying that such a mi

of Artemisium as--

The place where Athens' sons

Laid the bright foundation-stones, On which the pile of freedom rose. But these passages may have been written some years after the Persian war, when time had toned down the feelings of bitterness left by the fight of Platea. Still there was no love lost between Thebes and Athens, although the feud may have slumbered till it broke out again in the Peloponnesian war, and was afterwards, we may suppose, laid at rest for ever when Athens from the midst of her broken greatness saw herself avenged on her rival Sparta by the great Theban victories of Leuctra and Mantinea. There was no trace of jealousy between the two states when they fought side by side, and fought in vain, at Chaeronea; and there are few grander passages in Greek oratory than that

in which Æschines describes the sympathising sorrow of his countrymen at the ruin wrought on Thebes by Macedonian conquest :the occasion, by the way, on which The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, though temple and

tower

Went to the ground.

Pindar so far, we see, strove to make himself popular at Athens, as to bestow on the gay city its favourite epithet of Ainapai, which we have rendered 'brilliant' for want of a better equivalent. As he elsewhere applies the same epithet to his own Thebes, we may presume it imported a high compliment. In somewhat later times the Athenians had a peculiar fancy for talking of their brilliant' city: so that Aristophanes makes one of his characters say, mockingly, that by a profuse application of this epithet a demagogue might persuade the Athenian people to any measure that he might desire.

Although the Thebans may not have grudged this compliment to a hostile state, it may well be believed, that there would be many among them (at all events while the memory of the Persian war was recent) who would not at all like to hear Athens lauded as 'Ελλάδος ἔρεισμα, or to be reminded of Artemisium and Salamis. But, as we have said, there is no reason to suppose that Pindar, whatever his own sympathies may have been, set himself in any way to counteract the general policy of his countrymen. The expressions above quoted are no more than the graceful tribute which every Greek might be expected to pay to the great champion of Hellenic liberty, when her work was over and her victory won. There certainly seems to have been no undue eagerness on the part of Pindar to sing the praises of the city which his Thebes abhorred. In all his Epinicia we have only two odes in honour of Athenian victories, that of Megacles

in the chariot-race at Delphi, and that of Timodemus in the pancratium at Nemea. But on both of these occasions we note a certain constraint in glorifying the mother city of the victor, usually so favourite a theme with our poet. When he is celebrating the victories of Timodemus, he turns to the renown, not of Athens herself, but of Acharnæ, the township to which Timodemus belonged-that Acharnæ so well known to the readers of Aristophanes, and which, judging from the fiery old fellows in the play, we can well believe to have deserved Pindar's laudation—

Old legends name her breeder of brave men.

The ode in honour of Megacles is said to have been composed before the invasion of Xerxes. But even at this time Pindar does not seem very hearty in doing honour to Athens. He dwells rather on the fame of the great house of the Alcmæonidæ, which Megacles represented, and on the munificent gifts bestowed by them on the temple at Delphi. But i there was a feud at this time between the Alcmeonida and the commonwealth of Athens. That proud family had come to be looked upon with jealousy by the growing democracy; they were even under a suspicion of Persian sympathies, and were charged with having saved the Persian fleet by a signal after the battle of Marathon. Herodotus utterly scouts the story, but the fact of the accusation being made would indicate a bad state of the relations between Megacles and his country, and would illustrate the stinted praise which Pindar bestows on Athens in the ode. fact he takes care to let it be known that his sympathies are with Megacles against his State-hinting at the ingratitude with which Athens had treated the chief of that great house which set her free from the tyrant rule of the Pisistratidæ, while every Athenian was singing

In

Well! it was ever so. They say No human happiness can stay, Save for some counter-change of kind adversity.

Looking back at the whole story, we are satisfied that there is no foundation for attributing to Pindar an Hellenic patriotism which overpowered his Theban loyalty. This notion grew up, no doubt, when Hellenism was a much more tangible and genuine passion than it was when the hordes of Asia first burst upon Europe. Polybius inPolybius indeed-a more respectable authority than those who tell us of the poet's Panhellenic earnestness-gives us a tradition of an opposite character altogether, saying that Pindar was blamed in his day for having urged his countrymen, from prudential motives, to make common cause with the Persian rather than with the Greek. And he quotes the lines in which this advice was supposed to be given :

The sunshine of the commonwealth! Be that

The aim of every citizen. 'Tis Order maketh people great: Seek ye her cheery light and evermore withstand

The spirit of Faction, bitter nurse of

men,

That comes with poverty and sorrow in her hand.

It may have been that Pindar sought in these lines to prevail on his countrymen to act together in the face of the Persian invasion. The word houxia, which we are fain to trans

late order,' does not so much import the common allegiance to a settled government, as the spirit of union which binds men together for a common purpose-a spirit which was always very lax in the old Greek commonwealths, under which, when a state was at war with its neighbour, there was generally a party among the citizens of each belligerent who sympathised more with the enemy than with the dominant faction at home. It was the task of the greatest statesmen of Greece to smooth down these party jealousies, and to this task Pindar appears to have addressed himself in the lines above quoted. As they come from one of his lost lyrics we have no context to guide us to the particular circumstances under which they were written, and are bound perhaps to take Polybius' word that they were intended to apply to the Persian invasion.

We shall have another word, however, to say about Pindar's politics presently. All that we are concerned to contend for just now is that the position occupied by Thebes during the Persian war, the Theban patriotism of Pindar himself, and the earnestness with which he sought to promote unity of action among his fellow citizens, did not interfere with his character as a true Greek, or prevent him from faithfully revealing the poetic life of Greece as she was in his time. Those restless Greek commonwealths took the quarrels and wars which constantly fell out between themselves as the necessary result of their several independence, and were not the less inclined to venerate their common ties of race and religion because they were frequently encountering each other on the battle-field. And it was through the local affection which each State claimed from its citizens-those 'heptarchy patriotisms' which Mrs. Browning scorns and abhors-that the Greeks approached the idea of a common