Page:Pindar (Morice).djvu/52

38 impossible to accept such evidence without hesitation; but we have, in fact, no other. At least we may receive it as evidence, if not to the actual facts of Pindar's life, yet to the general impression produced by that life on the minds of succeeding generations. Questionable at best as records of the actual historical Pindar, these biographies represent to us at any rate the Pindar of tradition—Pindar as educated Greeks and modern scholars, following their lead, have been wont to picture him. The best of them, probably, and certainly the fullest, is that prefixed to his 'Commentaries on Pindar' by Eustathius, Archbishop of Thessalonica—a learned and laborious scholar of the twelfth century. A second, of unknown date and authorship, but probably not later than the last mentioned, is known as the 'Vita Vratislavensis,' having been found in an ancient manuscript at Breslau. A third is ascribed to Thomas Magister, a dull and blundering pedant of the fourteenth century; and a fourth—the oldest probably of all, but extremely meagre and unsatisfactory—to the lexicographer Suidas, of whom we only know that he lived at least as early as Eustathius, and at least as late as the close of the eleventh century. When the great modern scholar Boeckh published his magnificent edition of Pindar, the work of Eustathius had unluckily disappeared, and was supposed to have been lost for ever; but it has since been unearthed and made accessible to modern students, first by Tafel, in 1832, and again, in 1835, by E. W. Schneidewin. From the contents of these four biographies, and from