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18 est extant ode, to have outgrown his fault before he reached the age of twenty.

The death of a good and great man was regarded by the Choric poet as an actual translation into this ideal world of gods and heroes. There he met with his divine and heroic ancestors, and thenceforward shared their life and pleasures. As might therefore be expected, the extant fragments of Pindar's Dirges deal chiefly with this theme. A mass of occult speculation on the life after death was preserved in certain secret confraternities among the Greeks, whose meetings were attended with the celebration of the rites called "Mysteries." These "mysteries" have been described as "a sort of Greek Freemasonry." It is not for those uninitiated in either craft to judge of the justice of such a comparison. It is believed that sundry fragments of Pindar's Dirges bear traces of the influence of these speculations. In others he seems to adopt a more popular and less lofty creed; and in one especially, which we will take this opportunity to quote, he pictures the righteous dead as enjoying a state of unalloyed felicity, which, as he describes it, is a simple idealisation of perfect earthly happiness such as the Greeks conceived it. Thus he paints the life of the denizens of his "Earthly Paradise," for "earthly" we must own it to be:—

On them the sun in his strength sheds light, while here on earth is night,

And in meadows of red roses lies the suburb of their town,

With fruits of gold and spikenard bowers o'ergrown.