less good style, than the original ballad style; while it shares with the ballad style the inherent incapacity of rising into the grand style, of adequately rendering Homer. Scott is certainly at his best in his battles. Of Homer you could not say this: he is not better in his battles than elsewhere; but even between the battle pieces of the two there exists all the difference which there is between an able work and a masterpiece.

-"For not in the hands of Diomede the son of Tydeus rages the spear, to ward off destruction from the Danaans; neither as yet have I heard the voice of the son of Atreus, shouting out of his hated mouth': but the voice of Hector the slayer of men bursts round me, as he cheers on the Trojans; and they with their yellings fill all the plain, overcoming the Achaians in the battle." I protest that to my feeling, Homer's performance, even through that pale and far-off shadow of a prose translation, still has a hundred times more of the grand manner about it than the original poetry of Scott.

Well, then, the ballad manner and the ballad measure, whether in the hands of the old ballad poets, or arranged by Chapman, or arranged by Mr. Newman, or even arranged by Sir Walter Scott, cannot worthily render Homer. And for one reason: Homer is plain, so are they; Homer is natural, so are they; Homer is spirited, so are they but Homer is sustainedly noble, and they are not. Homer and they are both of them natural, and therefore touching and stirring: but the grand style, which is Homer's, is something more than touching and stirring it can form the character, it is edifying. The old English balladist may stir Sir Philip Sidney's heart like a trumpet, and this is much but Homer, but the few artists in the grand style, can do more; they can refine the raw natural man, they can transmute him. So it is not without cause that I say, and say again, to the translator of Homer: "Never for a moment suffer yourself to forget our fourth fundamental proposition, Homer is noble." For it is seen how large a share this nobleness has in producing that general effect of his, which it is the main business of a translator to reproduce.

PINDAR.

BY PROFESSOR R. C. JEBB.

[RICHARD CLAVERHOUSE JEBB, Litt.D., D.C.L., LL.D.; Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge University, and M.P. for the University, was born at Dundee, Aug. 27, 1841. His principal works are: a "Life of Bentley" (English Men of Letters), 1882; "Sophocles, with Critical Notes, Commentary, and Translations," 1883-96; "Introduction to Homer," 1886; "Lectures on the Growth and Influence of Greek Poetry," 1893; and articles on classical subjects in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1875-88. He is one of the most eminent of English classical scholars, and unsurpassed in the composition of Greek verse. As a member of Parliament, he has displayed the greatest interest in all subjects affecting the higher education. The essay on Pindar here given is the fifth of his "Lectures on the Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry," delivered before the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.]

IN the almost total loss of Greek lyric poetry the modern world has one consolation: the poet who closed the series of the masters was accounted the greatest of all. Sappho night be unapproachable in her kind; Stesichorus and Simonides might be pre-eminent in certain qualities respectively; but in range of power and loftiness of inspiration there was no rival to Pindar. This was the general and settled verdict of antiquity, in days when all the materials for a comparison existed. And though we possess only one class of Pindar's compositions, the class is that by which he had gained his widest popularity. If the Alexandrian critics had been asked to name any one kind of poem as characteristic of him, it is probable that they would have chosen the odes of victory, and there can be little doubt that the majority of ancient readers would have confirmed their choice. In relation to the development of Greek poetry, Pindar has a twofold interest: he continues the tradition which begins with Alcman and Stesichorus, while at the same time he may be regarded as, in a certain sense, the precursor of the Attic drama.

Little is known concerning his life. He was born near Thebes in 522 B.C., being thus a contemporary of Aeschylus, and survived the year 452 B.C.; the date of his death is unknown. He enjoyed an elaborate and many-sided training in the complex art of choral lyric composition. He belonged to one of the noblest families in Greece, that of the Aegeidae, which had branches at Thebes, Sparta, and Cyrene; and he stood in an intimate relation with the priesthood of Apollo at Delphi. These facts are of cardinal importance for a comprehension of his poetry. In his whole view of life he is an Hellenic aris

tocrat, profoundly convinced that men who trace their lineage to a hero have a strain of divine blood, which gives them natural advantages, moral and intellectual no less than physical, over other men. And he has also a priestly tone; he is an expounder of religious and ethical precepts, who can speak in the lofty and commanding accents of Delphi.

The forty-four odes of victory (epinikia) represent a type of poem which Pindar had received from predecessors. Archilochus had written a song to Heracles and Iolaus, with the refrain τývɛλλa kaλλívikɛ ("See, the conquering hero comes "), which had long been in use at Olympia, and was still popular in Pindar's time. In the course of the sixth century B.C., which saw a great development of the Greek national games, the more elaborate "ode of victory" came into being. Simonides, thirty-four years older than Pindar, was the first composer whose odes of victory became celebrated.

The first difficulty for moderns, when they try to appreciate. the work achieved by Pindar in this field, is that of conceiving the ancient festivals themselves which called forth these odes. What was the meaning of a victory in the games at Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, or the Isthmus? What kind of feelings did it evoke? Perhaps it would be hardly possible for us moderns to imagine these things adequately, even if we knew more than we do. The best resource is to make certain leading points clear to ourselves, and then combine them, as well as we can, in a mental picture.

Taking the Olympian festival, then, as the greatest, we may say, first of all, that the spectacle was one of extraordinary brilliancy. The "altis," or sacred precinct, of Olympia, richly adorned with the most splendid works of art, was a focus of Panhellenic religion. In the midst of it was the ancient altar of Zeus, representing the earliest Hellenic phase of the sanctuary, when the worship of Zeus was combined with the cult of the hero Pelops. This was the altar at which the Iamidae, the hereditary soothsayers, practised their rites of divination by fire, in virtue of which Olympia is saluted by Pindar as "mistress of truth." A little to the west of this was the Pelopion, a small precinct in which sacrifices had been offered to Pelops from the time when Achaeans founded Pisa. South of the Pelopion stood the temple of Zeus. The easternmost portion of this temple was open to the public; the middle portion was probably the place where the wreaths were pre