The Extant Odes of Pindar | Page 7

the phenomena of the human mind, and this granted,
can there be any knowledge more desirable than the knowledge of the
most vigorous and sensitive and in some ways also the most 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 Böckh and Dissen.
In the spelling of names I remain in that inconsistency which