Page:Odes of Pindar (Myers).djvu/16

10 of their courts. When asked why he did not, like Simonides, accept the invitations of these potentates to make his home with them, he answered that he had chosen to live his own life, and not to be the property of another. He died at the age of 79, that is, probably, in the year 443, twelve years before the Peloponnesian war began. Legend said that he died in the theatre of Argos, in the arms of Theoxenos, the boy in whose praise he wrote a Skolion of which an immortal fragment remains to us. Other myths gathered round his name. It was said that once when in childhood he had fallen asleep by the way 'a bee had settled on his lips and gathered honey,' and again that 'he saw in a dream that his mouth was filled with honey and the honeycomb;' that Pan himself learnt a poem of his and rejoiced to sing it on the mountains; that finally, while he awaited an answer from the oracle of Ammon, whence he had enquired what was best for man, Persephone appeared to him in his sleep and said that she only of the gods had had no hymn from him, but that he should make her one shortly when he had come to her; and that he died within ten days of the vision.

Two several conquerors of Thebes, Pausanias of Sparta and Alexander of Macedon,

At Delphi they kept with reverence his iron chair, and the priest of Apollo cried nightly as he closed the temple, 'Let Pindar the poet go in unto the supper of the god.'

Thus Pindar was contemporary with an age of Greek history which justifies the assertion of his consummate interest for the student of Hellenic life in its prime. It was impossible that a man of his genius and temperament should have lived through these times without representing to us with breadth and intensity the spirit that was in them, and there are several points in Pindar's circumstances which make his relation to his age peculiarly interesting. We may look on him as in some points supplementary to the great Athenian dramatists, whose works are doubtless far the most valuable literary legacy of the time.