Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/79

 forms of poetry which he cultivated may be described in his own words. It was— | : "meetly to blend the cithern's various voice, and the sounding flutes, and verses set thereto" (Ol. iii. 8). And so the teacher of the chorus, whose duty was to superintend the choral rehearsals of an ode, is called (Ol. vi. 91), one who "sweetly tempers resounding strains"; who sees that the flutes do not overpower the cithern, or either the words, but that the several elements are blended in a harmonious whole. Compare Ol. xiv. 17, | : "I have come [to Orchomenus], hymning Asopichus in Lydian mood, by voices of ripe skill"; literally, "in the Lydian mood, and by aid of practisings": where  refers to the poet's composition, and  to the rehearsals of the chorus. This point is missed by translating simply "strains"—a sense to which it surely cannot be reduced. We have some glimpses of the long technical development through which, before Pindar's day, Greek lyric poetry had passed; as in the reference to the improvement of the dithyramb (Ol. xiii. 18); to the said to have been invented by Olympus or Crates (, Pyth. xii. 23); to the  (Ol. vii. 88); and in the contrast between the ,—the so-called "song of Archilochus," with the