ART. VII. The Odes of Pindar, translated from the Greek. With Notes, Critical and Explanatory. By Abraham Moore, Esq. Part I. London. 1822. THE scholar comes to the study of Pindar, as to that of one whom fable and history, poetry and criticism, have alike delighted to honour. The writers of Greece speak of him as the man whose birth was celebrated by the songs and dances of the deities themselves, in joyous anticipation of those immortal hymns which he was to frame in their praise; to whom, in after-life, the God of Poetry himself devoted a share of the votive offerings of his shrine, and conceded a chair of honour in his most favoured temple. These were indeed fables, but fables that evidenced the truth: the reputation which they testified, went on increasing in magnitude and splendour. The glory of succeeding poets, the severity of the most refined criticism, the spread of sceptic philosophy no way impaired it; it was not obscured by the literary darkness of his country; it was not overpowered by the literary brightness of rival states. The fastidious Athenian was proud of the compliment paid to his city by a Boeotian; the elegant Rhodian inscribed his verses in letters of gold within the temple of his guardian deity; even the unlettered and uncompromising Spartan respected the memory of the pious bard, and spared, from general conflagration, the dwelling which bore the simple inscription, Burn not the house of the minstrel Pindar;' and in a later age the tasteful pupil of the great master critic, the devoted admirer of Homer, paid the same honour to genius, and, in the midst of war and vengeance, bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground. This is what we receive from Greece respecting the Theban poet; but if this were all, if we received his praise from his countrymen only, we should be bound, perhaps, to deduct something, if not for national exaggeration, yet on account of certain sources of delight which could be open only to them. For, not to mention the congeniality of habits of thinking and similarity of customs, the peculiar sensibility of the Greeks to poetic pleasure might induce us to receive with much caution their accounts of a favourite poet. Their all-powerful language too, partly perhaps the cause, but in a greater degree the effect of that sensibility, has a thousand treasures which the meanest Greek enjoyed, but which are for ever lost to us barbarians.' Undoubtedly there is a harmony in Pindar, which we may occasionally catch in distant murmurs, and broken snatches, but of which, in its perfection and completeness, completeness, the most tasteful and learned modern can have no notion; there is a beauty of collocation, a choice of words, a felicity of composition, which is lost to us, and which carries with it we know not how much of the foundation of Pindar's preeminent fame in Greece. It is not, however, his countrymen alone, who serve to form our notions of Pindar; our earliest and most familiar ideas respecting him are derived from the Romans. They had indeed the great advantage of reading him while Greek was yet a living tongue; but the genius of their language, and of their national poetry, as well as their own practical and imitative character, were unfavourable to the full enjoyment of his bold, figurative, and abstracted poetry. Yet in spite of this he seems to have ranked next after Homer in the estimation of Roman critics-every one knows the judgment of Quinctilian respecting him, and the profound veneration of Horace for his inimitable master.' With the lofty impressions derived from such sources, the scholar commences the study of Pindar. It will be asked, whether he finds them, upon experience, exaggerated or erroneous? We believe that few young men of ingenuous and poetic minds rise from the perusal of him without feelings of the deepest pleasure; but something must be allowed for the difficulty of the author. Pindar is undoubtedly difficult, not perhaps in his language or mere construction, (though even in these we do not always find him so easy as we could wish,) but in his histories and mythologies, and more often in the subtleness of those links which connect and moderate even his wildest and most sudden transitions. While the difficulty remains unconquered, we ought not to expect the full sense of pleasure; it is only then that we can feel him properly, when, having laboured through all impediments, we can lay aside the scholiast, and be carried on with him stage by stage, with no other pause than what the depth of his ideas, or our own excited minds may impose upon us. This remark applies to every class of poetical composition, but to none so pointedly as to the Lyric; for the ode is of all kinds of poetry that which admits most of enthusiasm; it is an essential excellence of it to be rapid, and, as it were, unpremeditated; and to enjoy it properly, we ought to be able to read and feel it in all its depths and heights, rapidly and uninterruptedly. It is not very easy to say any thing new upon Pindar, nor are we very anxious, because we do not think it very important, that what we say on this subject should be new; but in many respects he stands among the first of the poets of the world, and among those of his own country he is super-eminent for morality and piety. We trust, therefore, that we shall be excused, if we avail ourselves ourselves of the opportunity which the present translation affords us, of throwing together a few remarks that may diffuse more generally the desire to become acquainted with him. Congreve, we are told by the great critic of our country, was the first to teach us that Pindar was not irregular* in the structure of his odes; and since his time, most of the notions which the example of Cowley had connected with Pindaric poetry, have gradually been separated from it. The danger seems now to lie the other way; students are apt to take too literally the strong language of criticism, and become disappointed at not finding in him that self-evident order and unity which they have been led to ex pect. Undoubtedly he is regular-every ode has a fixed design; a reason may be given for the introduction and disposition of every part; and when the lyre rings out its full and final chords, we have the feelings which a musician experiences at the close of a well-composed strain in music; it is not a stop for want of breath; the original and governing air, however modified or varied, here scarcely perceived, and there recurring prominent and strong, has every where subsisted, and given a unity to the whole; and the strain ceases only because its design is accomplished. But every class of poetry, as every species of music, must, in this respect, be judged of by itself, and it would be idle to expect in an ode the same order in degree, or even in kind, which we have a right to demand in the epic or narrative poem. There is an important circumstance, too, peculiar to Pindar, which will naturally tend to make the plan and order of his odes less discernible even than those of other Lyric poets. His no or minal is scarcely ever his real subject; the pugilist, racer, charioteer, whose triumph he celebrates, stand indeed as the head and front,' bat Pindar felt that they were inadequate to bear the burthen of that mighty song which was to be sung to their honour; they are soon, therefore, dismissed from view altogether, or introduced from time to time more or less prominently according to circumstances, just to connect together the moral axiom, mythology, tradition, or history, which are indeed the subjects of the poem. The victor and his country were so identified in the glory of the conquest by the patriotic notions of Greece, that it is scarcely a transition from one to the other, and Pindar indifferently makes a principal of either. From the city to its patron deity, or its demi-god founder and the mythology respecting him, was another natural step: if the city were a colony, the leader of the colonization, its cause and history, or the glories of the mother * Dr. Johnson was no great reader of our old poets, or he might have known that some of them, and particularly Ben Jonson, had taught us this more than a century before Congreve was born. state, of state, were also obvious circumstances, sure to be gratefully received by the assembly before whom they were to be sung; if the immediate ancestor of the victor, or the common ancestor of his tribe were in any way celebrated, the connection here too presented itself at first sight, and the games themselves at which the crown had been won, offered a topic which, in default of others, could never be out of place. But very often the connecting link is far more delicate and difficult to trace-some slight circumstance, perhaps, in the life of the victor, or even in the contest itself, is the ground of an aphorism, or suggests an allusion (by way compliment or illustration) to some analogous tradition in the life of some hero or demi-god, and the whole poem takes its colour from this latter circumstance. Thus in the tenth Olympic Ode, (which may be cited as a specimen of Pindar's delicacy and judgment,) he seems to have had for his subject some one, of whom and of whose country little was to be said; and we may infer from the opening that the poem itself was extorted from him by repeated solicitations. It is curious to see how he turns to his own account what, in the hands of an ordinary man, could be no pleasant subject to the victor, and yet how completely he succeeds in so availing himself of it as to bring no pain to his feelings. Agesidamus, it seems, had either been defeated in a previous contest, or had nearly yielded in the beginning of that which he afterwards won; this unpromising fact may be said to give the colouring to the whole ode. The circumstance itself is rather alluded to than told; but then, says the poet, even Hercules, mighty as he was, was at first overpowered by Cycnus, whom yet he afterwards slew; and if you were indebted to the skill and encouragement of your master Ilas, who rallied you to victory, so was Patroclus to Achilles. At this point, we see that he has hinted at two sources of tradition, upon either of which he was at liberty to enlarge. He prefers Hercules, and satisfactory reasons may be given; he was not only the founder of the games, but his was a life of labour and disappointments crowned by success, and the poet selects a victory gained after defeat and severe loss. Another instance may be adduced, which will show, once for all, that Pindar's seeming departures from the subjects on which he professes to write, are by no means without system, and will also explain pretty well what that system was. Hiero, it seems, was more fond than some kings are said to be, of laureate odes, and was sure to be gratified, for he was a liberal paymaster. The first three Pythian odes are addressed to him; the first and second contain much that is personal, but in the third the poet might well find that subject exhausted, and accordingly he makes not the slightest mention of him in the first half of a poem consist ing ing of little more than two hundred lines; and of the last hundred scarcely fifty seem at first sight to have any thing to do with him or his victory; yet the whole poem has a strictly lyrical connection with him. Hiero was suffering under a painful disease; Pindar therefore opens with an appropriate wish, that the Centaur Chiron were again alive, with the same kind feeling towards mankind, and the same skill in the healing art which he had when he received the young Esculapius, brought him up in his cave, and instructed him in medicine. The mention of this demi-god, and his peculiar province of medicine, made it a digression but in the next degree,' to give his history; and his dismal punishment, when, tempted by gold, he dared to restore a dead man to life, furnishes an obvious ground for enforcing a discreet and pious moderation in our desires. Though, therefore, he, the poet and the friend, would gladly cross the sea, and bring with his lay a charm for the disease, yet he bids Hiero remember how chequered is the lot of all mortals by the condition of their fate, and how much of good benevolent Heaven has bestowed upon him to console him for his severe sufferings. In this respect he begs him to compare his lot with those of such illustrious personages as Cadmus and Peleus; they had struggled with severe trials, and fortune seemed at length to change; they married goddesses; the deities honoured their nuptial feasts with their presence, and their blessings; but, for all this, 6 Sorrow, unseen, yet hover'd round : Cadmus, at life's distressful close, His phrensied children's furies press'd; Though genial Jove one for his consort chose, One matchless son, on Phrygia's fatal plain By shaft obscure untimely slain, Mourn'd with all Greece his early grave.'-p. 193. We need not multiply examples; the principle of the Pindaric ode must be clear to our readers, and it was a principle adopted from necessity. However important to the individual, his family, or even to his city, might be the victory achieved at Pisa, yet in itself it was no fertile subject for a poet; one race, one boxingmatch well described, and they were all described. But the rich and boundless expanse of tradition, mythology, or history, was ever open to the poet, and he launched fearlessly into it. He could connect his tale with his subject by family, by country, by similarity of fortune, or of conduct, nay even by contrast of either. Thus a class of subjects, at first sight extremely poor, furnished, and the more readily, perhaps, on account of its own intrinsic po |