Page:Pindar (Morice).djvu/118

104 Thus the alchemy of song transmutes the rough log-huts of the new settlement into a stately forest, with a god to plant it, to water it, and to give it increase.

The Ode for Ergoteles of Himera, victor in the long-race (Ol. xii.), stands in one respect alone among the compositions of Pindar. It is from first to last the expression of a single thought—"Inscrutable are the ways of Providence."

Civil strife had driven Ergoteles from his native Cretan city. But this seeming misfortune, says the poet, has proved a blessing in disguise. Had he remained at home in Crete—

he would have frittered away in petty insular competitions the gift of speed which, under more favourable auspices, has ripened into victory at Olympia, Pytho, and the Isthmus. Yet who could have foreseen such a result of exile? How little men know of their real good! Verily, "a man cannot tell what shall be."

This one thought underlies the whole Ode. It opens with an invocation of Fortune, the saviour-goddess, piloting ships at sea, wars and councils by land. This leads to a fine description of the vanity of human expectations, and the fortunes of Ergoteles are used to point the moral of the poem.

Very graceful and pleasing is the little Ode (Ol. xiv.) in honour of the boy-racer Asopichus of Orchomenus, in Bœotia. Pindar, when it pleased him, could touch a theme as lightly and daintily as Horace himself. As the old Greek scholiast remarked, when he reached at