Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/81

 |  |. "Born with him is the power that makes a man's name great; but whoso hath the fruits of lore alone, he walks in a vain shadow; his spirit veers with every breeze; he never plants a sure foot in the lists; he dallies with ambitions numberless, but his mind achieves not one."

§ 13. The third Nemean cannot be dated; but another of the odes just quoted, the second Olympian (for Thero of Acragas) is of 476 B.C.; and in the second Pythian—of 477 B.C.—occurs the well-known passage in which Pindar warns Hiero of Syracuse against flatterers,—adding that those who seek to snatch an unfair start (, v. 90) sometimes overreach themselves. It can scarcely be doubted that the emphatic contrast of poetical and  has some personal reference. But I cannot believe that Simonides is the person intended. His avarice is probably (as suggested above) an object of Pindar's allusion elsewhere; but, so far as we can now judge, the work of Simonides bore a stamp so distinctive that it would have been unmeaning to speak of him as devoid of native faculty. In 476 B.C., however, Bacchylides, the nephew of Simonides, was still a young poet; about that time—the year is doubtful—he had written on a victory won at Olympia by a horse of Hiero's called Pherenicus—which (or a namesake) is mentioned in Pindar's first Olympian ode (472 B.C.); and he was probably rising into notice at the courts of the Sicilian princes, where