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Pindar, Athens and Thebes: Pyth. IX. 151–170
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2016
Extract
The ninth Pythian is one of Pindar's masterpieces. It contains the romantic story of the love of Apollo for the heroic nymph Cyrene, which is the foundation-legend of the great city, and he attaches to the end of the ode another graceful love-tale which was a family tradition of the athlete's ancestors. The style of the ode is suitable to the subject, and the rhythm is partly Dorian, partly Lydian. Therefore the grand style which is maintained throughout, the style in which Pindar always excels, is richly mellowed and tempered with a certain lusciousness, a rarer quality of his work, but appropriate here to the romantic theme. And Pindar combines here the energy which is his birthright with a certain dignified ease and clearness, and his besetting faults of harshness, bitterness, or overpungency and overstrain are absent altogether. ‘Out of the strong hath come forth sweetness.’
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1915
References
page 198 note 1 περὶ Aντιοσ., p. 87.
page 198 note 2 De Glor, Athen., c. 7.
page 199 note 1 Boeckh's objection that the women are said to see him also and that they would not have been able at Athens, where they were excluded from the athletic shows, is of slight weight. We are not sure what the women at Athens might see or might not see; and Pindar could speak as he does, if only they could see Telesikrates from the window.
page 200 note 1 The prologue of Pyth. VIII., with its reference to the Gigantomachia and the insolence of Porphyrion, cannot allude to the struggle between Aigina and Athens. The parable is probably spoken against Persia.