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Muses on Pindos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

A. D. Fitton Brown
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Extract

Pindos, the mountain range between Thessaly and Epeiros, is not without renown. It appears first in Pindar (Pythian ix. 15), where in its ‘storied dells’ Kreousa gave birth to Hypseus by the love of the river-god Peneios. It, or more likely the town of the same name in Doris, was known to Pindar (Pythian i. 66) as the home of the Dorians, and it appears in Aeschylus and Sophokles—in the former (Supp. 257) as the north-western boundary of Pelasgos' realm, in the latter (Fr. 249) as the source of the Acheloos. Kallimachos, Theokritos, and Orpheus refer to it, and in Latin it is at least as old as Virgil. We find it in Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Lucan, Silius, and Valerius Flaccus,3 and in the course of antiquity it acquired a reputation as a lofty, wooded mountain which persists in Claudian and through the Dark Ages. Once more it is the setting for an amour of Apollo; Paion's mother, Liagore, receives leech-craft as the price of her favours (Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 41); and the same Spenser praised the whiteness of its snow (Prothalamian, 40). Wordsworth, as he wondered at the torrent at the Devil's Bridge, asked:

‘Hath not Pindus fed thee, where the band Of Patriots scoop their freedom out, with hand Desperate as thine?’

and it was about the Pindos range that, in 1940, another band of patriots repelled the Italian invasion of their country and won the first Allied victory of World War II.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1961 , pp. 22 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1961

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References

page 22 note 1 Not Kyrene, as Oberhummer asserts (R.E. xx. 1700).Google Scholar

page 22 note 2 Curiously echoed by the eleventh-century Wido of Ivrea, v. 187: ‘hanc habitant Indi, gens et prius incola Pindi.’

page 22 note 3 The reference to Pomponius Mela, ii. 3 in Facciolati and Forcellini, Lemprière, Pape, and Lewis and Short appears to be false.

page 22 note 4 Spenser was presumably thinking of Asklepios, who was traditionally associated with the paean. He seems to have conflated the birth on Pindos, (Pyth. ix. 15)Google Scholar with the birth of Asklepios, (Pyth. iii. 8)Google Scholar and Oenone's receipt of leechcraft (Ovid, , Heroides, v. 139).Google Scholar

page 23 note 1 I have not yet seen Wilamowitz, , ‘Der Berg der Musen’ (Reden und Vorträge, 1 4. 102).Google Scholar

page 23 note 2 So, in the tenth century, Bishop Lüttich of Verona: ‘posthabens fontem Caballinum bicipitemque Parnassum, vitae fontem si cognoscerem’. In this paragraph I have made extensive use of Curtius, , ‘Die Musen im Mittelalter’, Zeitschr.für rom. Phil, lix (1939), 129Google Scholar; cf. lxiii (1943), 256.

page 23 note 3 Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, No. 110.

page 23 note 4 Cf. ‘Helicon est tary’ (Bellay, du, Regrets, 190)Google Scholar; ‘of Helicon my fill’ (Burns).

page 23 note 5 e.g. Aldhelm (seventh century); Lüttich (cited above); anon, to Bovo (eleventh century); Chaucer, , Franklin's Prologue, 13Google Scholar; Bellay, du, Regrets, 2Google Scholar and passim; de Tyard, , Erreurs Am. ii. 2Google Scholar. Actually the context in Persius suggests that Ennius really did claim to have dreamt that he was on Parnassos and that it was not just Persius' way of speaking, as Hardie wants us to believe.

page 24 note 1 That at least is the impression that any but the most scrupulous critic would be sure to draw. The passage from Ecl. xGoogle Scholar was translated by Shelley.

page 24 note 2 DrBrowne, R. A. has drawn my attention to similar references in the sixteenth-century Latin verses of the Flaminii (Prati, 1831).Google Scholar

page 25 note 1 Pindos as a Muses' mountain is in Chompré, 's Dictionnaire (1782)Google Scholar, and doubtless came there from earlier works of reference. I cannot find it, however, in du Bellay, Malherbe, or Boileau, or in de Tyard's scholarly Discours des Muses.

page 26 note 1 I am grateful to Professors M. L. Clarke, R. C. Knight, and K. Spalding, to Dr. W. J. B. Owen, and to Mr. A. R. Burn for help with references.