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72 by dwelling on the divine institution of a contest, the dignity of the gods who preside over it, and the various traditional associations which consecrate its scene; (4) The supporting, by arguments drawn from a divine antiquity, of theses, moral, political, and philosophical, which the poet desired from time to time to propound and justify. Sometimes, by a happy selection of his instances, the poet is able to serve several, or even all, of these purposes at once. But any one of them seems a sufficient reason for the introduction of a myth. And where such a sufficient reason can be shown, it seems hypercritical, if not unreasonable, to insist too strongly on trifling indications of a possibility that the poet may have had other motives in introducing it.

The transitions by which Pindar passes from his nominal to his real themes, from the commemoration of a victory to the world of legend in which he best loves to dwell, are among the most extraordinary features of his poetry. No à priori considerations of the manner in which such transitions might be expected to be made will give the most remote conception of the manner in which they actually are made. Instantly, unexpectedly, at a leap, he plunges from the present to the past, and from the past to the present—from fact to fiction, and from fiction back again to fact. The apparently casual mention of a place or a person is followed by a long mythological episode, to all appearance a mere digression, but which on reflection is found to be adapted with surprising skill to the main purposes of the Ode. But this is not all. The legend introduced so strangely is often as strangely