Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/140

 ii.) is much more than "angry and overborne." The king of the Epeans, when "into the deep channel running deathwards, he watched-ἵζοισαν ἑὰν πόλιν-his own city sink" (Olymp. x.38), remains in one's mind by the echoing "my own" of the last wordsl so Pelops praying "by the grey sea-surge-οἶος ἐν ὄρφνᾳ, alone in the darkenss"-in Olymp. i.; so that marvellous trumpet-crash in Pyth. iv. (ant. 5) on the last great word τιμάν. Many lovers of Pindar agree that the things that stay in one's mind, stay not as thoughts, but as music.

Few people care for Pindar now. He is hard in the original-dialect, connection, state of mind, all are difficult to get into; and readers are wearied by the strange mixture of mules and the new moon and trainers and the Aecidae. In translations-despite the great skill of some of them-he is perhaps more grotesquely naked than any poet; and that, as we saw above, for the usual reason, that he is nothing but a poet. There is little rhetoric, no philosophy, little human interest; only that fine bloom-what he calls ἄωτος-which comes when the most sensitive language meets the most exquisite thought, and which "not even a god though he worked hard" could keep unhurt in another tongue.

Pindar was little influenced either by the movements of his own time or by previous writers. Stesichorus and Homer have of course affected him. There are just a few notes that seem from Aeschylus: the eruption of Aetna is treated by both; but Pindar seems quite by himself in his spendid description (''Pyth'. i.). It is possible that his great line λῦσε δὲ Ζεὺς ἄφθιτος Τιτᾶνας, is suggested by the Prometheus trilogy, of which it is the great lesson-"Everlasting Zeus set free the Titans."