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 Mistress of Truth. At other times, again, he declares with equal emphasis that no forecast of the future is possible. "Never yet has any mortal man won from the gods a sure token of an event to come, but forecasts of the future have been doomed to blindness";. Again: "the sign from Zeus attends not on men with clearness ." If Pindar had been asked to explain the apparent contradiction, the answer would probably have been that, when the gods give omens which they intend men to understand, these omens are infallible; but that often such divine tokens are altogether withheld; and that in many instances, when some sign is vouchsafed, but not of a clear kind,—as if to try the spiritual insight of men,—men interpret such a sign amiss. Such a view of divination would have been just such as it was the policy of an oracular priesthood to propagate. Those who worked the machinery of the great oracles were concerned to hold the balance between the doctrine that there is a sacred science of divination, that the gods do inspire their chosen ministers, and the plain lesson of experience, that inferences drawn from oracles or omens were often fallacious Pindar well