sented to the victors; the westernmost contained the image of Olympian Zeus, forty feet high, wrought in ivory and gold by Pheidias, and inspired by these words of Homer: "The son of Cronus spake, and nodded his dark brow, and the ambrosial locks waved from the king's immortal head, and he shook great Olympus." Externally this temple was richly adorned with sculpture. The east front exhibited twenty-one colossal figures by Paeonius, a group representing the moment before the chariot-race between Oenomanus and Pelops. The west front showed the fight of the Lapithae and the Centaurs. On the metopes were depicted the twelve labours of Heracles.

Other temples within the altis were those of Hera and the Mother of the Gods. There was also a large number of votive edifices, including the twelve treasure-houses, having the character of small Doric temples, erected by twelve Greek states in honour of the Olympian Zeus. Olympia was not merely a sanctuary, but also the political centre of a league,a sacred city; and therefore the sacred precinct included a town hall and an agora, while outside of it were a council-hall, a gymnasium, and other buildings.

On the east of the altis was the stadion, an oblong enclosure used for the foot-races, as well as for the contests in boxing, wrestling, leaping, quoit-throwing, and javelin-throwing. It is computed that upwards of 40,000 spectators could have seen these contests from the neighbouring slopes. The hippodrome, for chariot-races and horse-races, extended south and south-east of the stadion. The valley of the Alpheus is itself of great beauty. Looking eastward, one sees the snowcrowned ranges of Erymanthus and Cyllene in Arcadia. Imagine what it must have been when all those treasures of art, from which the Hermes of Praxiteles and the winged Victory of Paeonius are mere waifs and strays, were seen in the warm sunlight of September! One can understand the orator Lysias calling Olympia the "fairest place in Greece." At this festival, all parts of Hellas-from the furthest settlement in the western Mediterranean to the colonies of Asia Minor, the Euxine, or Libya-were represented by their foremost men, the foremost in athletic prowess, the foremost in poetry, music, eloquence, the foremost in wealth and power. To enter for the chariot-race was a costly ambition: a rich man who did so was considered as reflecting honour on his city; and a Sicilian prince such as Hieron or Theron welcomed

the opportunity, not only for the sake of displaying his resources, but also as a means to popularity.

Finally, the whole festival was profoundly penetrated by religious feeling, which gave it solemnity without overclouding its free joyousness. The gods, Zeus above all, and the heroes, especially Heracles and Pelops, were present amidst their worshippers, glorious in the creations of art, and were felt as watching, inspiring, and rewarding the competitors. There is therefore nothing in modern life that can properly be compared with a victory at Olympia. The modern horse-race or boatrace may attract vast crowds, and may even assume the importance of a public holiday; but the Olympian gathering was not merely that: it was also a religious celebration. There is a still further difference. The glory of the modern race-winner or athlete is brief; it lives in the memory of a few, but not with the public. The Olympian victor, however, was a distinguished man from that moment to the end of his days. He had shed lustre on his native city, and was sure of such honours as it could bestow. His name was recorded at Olympia. Go where he might throughout Hellas, the title which he had won (ỏλvμπiovíκns) sufficed to procure him a more than respectful welcome. This permanent renown had its counterpart in the permanent value attached to odes of victory like Pindar's. Such an ode was indeed an occasional poem, in the sense that it was written to celebrate a particular event; but it was not ephemeral. An epinikion by Pindar was an abiding monument, an heirloom for the victor, his family, and his city. Thus the ode in which Pindar celebrated the victory of the Rhodian Diagoras is said to have been copied in letters of gold, and deposited in the temple of Athena at Lindus in Rhodes. The anxiety of the foremost men in Hellas to obtain such a memorial can easily be understood even though they may not have believed the poet's true prophecy, that his tribute, besides travelling further, would live longer than the marble of the sculptor.

An ode of Pindar is composed of various elements which are nowhere else so blended in literature, and which in the actual life of Hellas were nowhere so vividly brought together as at Olympia. First of these elements is splendour,-a reflex in Pindar's opulent and brilliant language of the material splendour which Olympia could show in so many forms,-the marble of temples and statues, the brilliant colours which

everywhere inet the eye when embassies from the courts of Greek princes in Africa or Sicily were present in the altis, and when every city in Hellas that appeared at all was anxious to add something of magnificence to the scene; the splendour of athletic beauty in men and youths, perfectly developed by long months of training; the splendour of rushing movement when chariots swept round the hippodrome, and when speed of foot or disciplined strength was tested in the stadion; the splendour of choral music, and of stately ritual at the altars; the splendour of nature around and above, whether sunshine was lighting up the altis and shining on the snows of the distant Arcadian hills, or the scene was steeped in that softer radiance of which Pindar speaks, when "the full orb of the mid-month moon" looked down at evening on feast and music and song. As an instance of this quality in Pindar's style, we might take the first words of his first Olympian: "Water is best, and gold is the shining crown of lordly wealth, like a flaming fire in the darkness; but if thou wouldst sing of prizes in the games, look not by day for a star in the lonely heaven that shall rival the gladdening radiance of the sun; nor let us think to praise a place of festival more glorious than Olympia." In this splendour is included swiftness. The frequent and rapid transition from image to image, from one thought to another which has started up in the poet's mind, is one of the reasons why it is impossible truly to represent Pindar in continuous translation.

The second element which Olympia offered to the sight and the thought, as Pindar offers it to the thought and the ear, is the kinship of the present with the heroic past. The sacred ground of Olympia on which the competitors moved everywhere reminded them of the heroes, the ancestors of the noblest Hellenes, the common glory of the Hellenic race. Here was a memorial of Pelops, there of Heracles, of Telamon or his son Ajax, of Peleus or his son Achilles, and many more, -all exemplars of strenuous effort, and of immortal fame won through effort, by the grace of the gods, and of the poets whom the gods inspired. Stesichorus had set the first great pattern of heroic legend treated in lyric verse. Simonides seems to have dwelt more, in his odes on victory, on the particular circumstances of the victory which he was celebrating; and this is what might have been anticipated from his general bent. Pindar passes, as a rule, lightly and briefly over the details of the victory itself, and then links on his theme to

some heroic legend, which often occupies the bulk of the ode. Towards the end, he returns again to his immediate theme. In finding a suitable link between theme and myth he shows marvellous skill: it is one of those points in which his versatile art well repays close study. But here I would rather draw attention to a larger aspect of his dealing with the heroic legends. These legends serve to invest the particular victory with a general significance, and to raise our thoughts from the latest victor towards one who strove and prevailed in far-off days. They lend an ideal charm to a triumph of which the interest would otherwise be mainly local or personal; and in doing this they render Pindar's poetry once more a faithful mirror of Olympia. The youngest conqueror who had just received his chaplet of wild olive moved in an atmosphere of memories which raised his achievement to a still higher level by connecting it with the ancestral glories of his race.

A third element common to the Olympian altis and the Pindaric ode is counsel. When the priests sprung from Iamus stood beside the altar of Zeus, and read the fiery signs, they expounded to men the omens of the future. The athlete about to enter the stadion saw before him an altar of Kairos, personified Opportunity, the power that enables competitors to seize the critical moment. In such forms, and many others, the promptings or warnings of divine counsel were expressed at Olympia; but this was not all. The assembled Hellenes might there hear the voice of philosopher, or poet, or statesman, who chose that occasion to urge lessons of wisdom. Pindar is thoroughly in harmony with the genius of the national festivals when he weaves precepts of religion or ethical maxims into the richly embroidered textures of his odes. He interprets no special theory; rather he gives an impressive utterance to sentiments and rules of conduct which were generally current among Hellenes,-summing up, as it were, the teaching of Hellenic experience in a manner appropriate to such a festival. And as the Iamidae might have spoken from their altar in the altis, so Pindar speaks from the spiritual vantage-ground of his relation with Delphi. That is, he speaks loftily, with authority; and not seldom his phrases have an oracular stamp, being terse, strangely worded, or even enigmatic.

There is yet one other feature in which the mind of Pindar reflects Olympia. The festival brought Greeks together from

the whole Hellenic world. The imagination of Pindar has a corresponding tendency to range swiftly over the entire area of Hellas, including the remotest regions to which Hellenes had penetrated. How spacious a fancy appears in his figurative description of a man whose hospitalities were unstinted and continual : "Far as to the Phasis was his voyage in summer days, and in winter to the shores of Nile." When his song has had free course, he thinks of it as a ship that has sailed westward, even beyond the gates of the Mediterranean, and cries, "None may pass beyond Gadeira into the gloom of the west; set our sails once more for the land of Europa.' A voyage to the Pillars of Heracles furnishes him with a comparison for the utmost extent of good fortune. Here, as in his lofty flight and in his swift descent upon his object, he is indeed the eagle among poets, who surveys the whole field of Hellenic existence, while his piercing glance darts from land to land and from city to city.

Such, then, are the principal elements common to the festival and the poetry: splendour of light and colour, of physical beauty, of swift movement and strenuous effort, of choral music and stately worship, of natural scenery; vivid sympathy between the present and the heroic past; wisdom speaking by the voice of priest and prophet; a feeling for the unity of Hellas, quickened by the sense of its vastness and variety.

The choral form in which Pindar has blended these elements, and the manner of blending them, are more difficult to describe. The first Olympian ode may be taken as typical. The ode, of one hundred and sixteen verses, is composed in four triads of twenty-nine verses each; the triad consisting of a strophe and antistrophe, each of eleven verses, followed by an epode, of seven verses. The chorus, in singing each strophe and antistrophe, accompanied their song with rhythmic dancing; in singing each epode they remained stationary. This ode was in honour of a victory in the horse-race at Olympia, won by Hieron, the ruler of Syracuse, in 472 B.C., and was intended for performance at Hieron's court. begins with this immediate theme, Hieron's victory; then passes to the legend of Tantalus and his son Pelops; and ends with a further reference to Hieron. These three sections, beginning, middle, and end, do not correspond precisely with the limits of triads; but we may say, roughly, that the first triad is given to Hieron, the second and third triads are given

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