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114 crushed for the time the two most powerful foes of the Greeks in Sicily, the Phœnicians of Carthage and the Tyrrhenians of Etruria. Thus Pindar describes the battle, and prays that its effects may be lasting:—

Oh, grant that in peace the mingled host,

Phœnician and Tuscan, henceforth may dwell, late vanquished on Cumæ's coast!

Mourn they at home their navies brought by Syracusa's king to nought,

Who, headlong from the swift ship's side, their warriors hurled beneath the tide,

And rescued Hellas from serfdom sore.

For Salamis be Athens famed;

Nor less brave Sparta's feats proclaimed,

That laid beneath Cithæron low

The archer-Medians! But, by Himera's shore,

Guerdon we with praise the might of Hiero's house, that crushed the foe!"

The Pirst Nemean is divided pretty equally between two themes, the virtues of Chromius (viceroy, as has been said, of Hiero in Ætna) and the myth of the infant Heracles. Allusion has been made in a previous chapter to the apparently gratuitous introduction of this legend; but a Nemean victory would naturally remind the poet of Heracles the slayer of the Nemean lion, and possibly the two snakes strangled by the infant hero may have been intended by Pindar to typify the combination of fierce barbarian foes over which the nascent Syracucan dynasty had triumphed so magnificently at Himera. Or he may have intended a compliment to the new civilisation which Chromius had established at Ætna, victorious over the deadly an-