Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/95

 a thought upon my lips that lends keen motive to my song; it woos my willing soul with the spirit of fair-flowing strains." The image of the whetstone recurs in Isthm. v. 72: | : "well mightest thou say, such is he among athletes as the stone of Naxos among stones, the grinding whet that gives an edge to bronze."

With regard to this metaphor, as to many others in Greek lyrics which are apt to strike us as harsh or even grotesque, there is a general principle which ought, I think, to be clearly perceived. Most Indo-European nouns expressed some one obvious and characteristic quality of the object which they denoted: e.g. is "the swimmer,", "the thing which is cleft," &c. Similarly, is the sharpener,  is the mixer, &c. A Greek who called a thought an was thus using a less startling image than we should use in calling it a whetstone; to call the teacher of a chorus a  was not the same thing as it would be for us to call him a bowl. And such phrases are less audacious in proportion as they are old,—i.e. near to the time when the language was still freshly conscious of the primary sense in such words as.

§ 19. The range of Pindar's comparisons for his own art would not have been completely surveyed if we overlooked some of a more familiar or even homely kind. Poets are "the cunning builders" of song (, Pyth. iii. 1 13).