The Extant Odes of Pindar | Page 7

fruitful action of human minds that the world has known hitherto?
But again, we are told that the age we seek thus toilsomely to illustrate and realize is too remote to justify the attempt, that our civilisation is of too different a type from the Hellenic, and that a gulf of three-and-twenty centuries is too much for our sight to strain across. But is not the Hellenic life at least less remote now to Western Europe than it has ever been since the Northern invasions? Though the separation in time widens does not the separation in thought decrease? Is not one civilisation more like another than it can be to any barbarism? And shall not this same Physical Science herself by accustoming us to look on men in large masses at once, and on the development of humanity as a process of infinite duration, as a sectional growth included in universal evolution--Science, in whose eyes a thousand years are as a watch in the night--shall she not thereby quicken our sympathies with the most gifted race that has appeared in our short human history, and arouse the same feeling toward it as a family may cherish toward the memory of their best and choicest, who has died young?
Only let us take heed that such regret shall make us not more but less unworthy of those noble forerunners. One symptom of the renewed influence of antiquity on the modern world is doubtless and has been from time to time since the Revival of Letters a tendency to selfish and somewhat sickly theories so-called of life, where sensibility degenerates through self-consciousness into affectation, and efforts to appreciate fully the delightfulness of life and art are overstrained into a wearisome literary voluptuousness, where duty has already disappeared and the human sympathies on which duty is based scarcely linger in a faint aesthetic form, soon to leave the would-be exquisiteness to putrefy into the vulgarity of egoism. Such tendencies have less in common with the Hellenic prime than with the court of Leo the Tenth, though even that had perhaps an advantage over them as being in some ways a more real thing. But that the Hellenic prime with all its exquisite sensibility was deficient in recognition of a high ideal of duty can never be believed among those who have studied it candidly and attentively; I have endeavoured above to suggest that in this point, take it all in all, it yields to no age or race. It would indeed be a mistaken following of those noble servants of humanity to draw from their memories an argument for selfish isolation or for despair of the commonwealth of man. He who has drunk deeply of that divine well and gazed long at the fair vision of what then was, will, if his nature be capable of true sympathy with the various elements of that wonderful age, turn again without bitterness to the confused modern world, saddened but not paralysed by the comparison, grieving, but with no querulous grief, for the certainty that those days are done.
1874.
PREFATORY NOTE.
The few notes appended to this translation are not intended to supply the place of such reference to Dictionaries of Mythology, Antiquities and Geography, as is needful to the student of Pindar who is not already somewhat accomplished in knowledge of the customs, history and legendary traditions of Hellas. And although it may reasonably be supposed that the chief of these will be already known to most readers of Pindar, yet so profusely allusive is this poet that to understand his allusions will very often require knowledge which would not have been derived from a study of the more commonly read Hellenic writers.
Nor have I attempted to trace in detail the connection of the parts in each ode which binds them into one harmonious whole with many meanings--a connection so consummately contrived where we can trace it that we may suppose it no less exquisite where we cannot. Study and thought will generally suggest explanations, though these will sometimes approve themselves differently to different minds. Too often we must acknowledge, as elsewhere in ancient literature, that the key is lost beyond all certain hope of recovery.
Still less have I attempted to discuss questions of critical scholarship. Sometimes where there are more than one plausible reading I have signified which I adopt; once only (Ol. 2. 56.) I have ventured on an emendation of my own. For the most part I have, as was natural, followed the text of B?ckh and Dissen.
In the spelling of names I remain in that inconsistency which at present attaches to most modern writers who deal with them. Olympus, Athens, Corinth, Syracuse, and the like are naturalized among us by long familiarity; it seems at present at least pedantic to change them. In the case