v. [Pyth. VIII. 88-97.]

2. but who has newly been crowned with honour in his tender youth, through high hope soars on wings of manhood, having thoughts to think which are better than riches.

5. Ev bλíy-in brief space.

7. shaken by heaven's adverse doom.

vi. [Nem. VI. 1-7.]

2-3. mãoa &c.-the sole difference is that our powers are different, since we are as naught, but the brazen heaven is an everabiding seat. With this use of wâs cp. Pl. Rep. 602 D.; Soph. Phil. 622, El. 301.

4. nevertheless we have some likeness to immortals in mightiness of mind, or it may be even of body.

6. we know not what goal of life fate has allotted for our course in the day or in the night.

viii.

This fragment is the best extant specimen of a dithyramb. It was composed for the greater Dionysia at Athens.

1. The use of iv with the accusative is a Boeotian idiom. Lit.Look on our chorus and assist at the loud music which graces it, Olympian gods.

3. μpaλòv, i. e. the altar of the twelve gods in the ảyopd mentioned in v. 5.

5. πανδαίδαλον perhaps alludes to painting and sculpture in the Agora. In v. 7 A60ev is construed with #opeʊlévτ', and refers to the custom of invoking Zeus as the inspirer of song. Hence in v. 8 deÚTepov means-in the second place, i. e. after addressing Zeus he comes in the second place to Dionysus. In vv. II, 12 the use of the plurals "august fathers" and "Cadmeian mothers," where only Zeus and Semele are intended, is a Pindaric idiom. In v. 13 μávτiv où Aaveável, lit.—is not unobserved by him, means-fails not to remind

The μάντις

him that the season for songs to Dionysus is come. either simply means Pindar himself, who seems to have sent this dithyramb from Nemea, or else refers to the priest at Nemea who had the charge of the palm-tree from which were plucked the branches given to victors in the Nemean games.

14-15. soon as the chamber of the Hours is opened and the nectared flowers catch the footfall of fragrant spring. In vv. 16-20 the use of the singular verbs ßáλλerai and ¿xeî with plural nominatives is called the schema Pindaricum." BáλλeTai-are strewed. ῥόδα κόμαισι μίγνυται-roses bloom among the leaves.

ix.

The subject is an eclipse of the sun.

1. θεῶν μᾶτερ ὀμμάτων—Mother of swift sight.

2. ἄστρον is in apposition to ἀκτὶς ἀελίου, which is equivalent to ἀέλιος.

3. ἰσχὺν ποτανὰν ἀνδράσι καὶ σοφίας ὁδὸν is—man's soaring-power (sc. his sight) and the field of his science.

5. ¿λaúveis ti vewtepov—You are bringing on some change:—with the implication that the change is for evil.

X.

i, 1-7. The marginal analysis proceeds on Dissen's remarks that the funeral sacrifice at which the dirge was sung would be held in the evening, and that (Pindarico more) #рoáστiov may allude to the scene of the actual burying-place in a suburb.

vv. 8-9 are a fragment of the other side of the picture.

ii, I. Böckh inserts μετανίσσονται before τελευτάν—by a happy fate all (living men) are passing onward to a period of their cares. 4. paσo.—while the body is busy.

5. points to that doom of joy or pain which is creeping up. Kplois seems to be used with reference to the Pindaric expression Epíσis åé0λæv, i. e. the decision of the judges as to who is to have the prize. So here-the decision of Rhadamanthus as to who is to meet with reward or punishment.

Ee

iii, 1. wévdeos, i. e. their pain as caused by their fault.

2. ἐνάτῳ ἔτει. Here the nine years take the place of the ἐς τρὶς Kaтéρwo Bíos spoken of in Ol. 2, supra i, 67. Further the soul's career is here varied by the interposition of a heroic life. One of the dirges is omitted as being probably spurious.

With the whole passage cp. Virg. Æn. 6. 637-751.

XX.
[Aristotle.]

1-2. lit. O thou the noblest pursuit for life through many labours for the race of men.

6. Such fruit dost thou induce upon the mind, such as withers not and is sweeter than gold or parents or the languid eyes of sleep. Cp. Soph. Philoct. 67, λύπην 'Αργείοις βαλεῖς.

13. 'Aтapvéos Evтpopos, sc. Hermeias of Atarneus.

åeλíov xhpwσev avyàs is commonly taken to mean-deprived himself of light (i. e. died). Or it may be for ἐχήρωσεν ἥλιον αὐγῶν by dying he as it were took away the light from the sun. Or thirdly Xnpów may be used in an immediately factitive sense-he made forlorn the light of day.

EVEN after Homer, and Archilochus, and Pindar, there was something wanting to poetical maturity in Greece. The poetry of vivid but unreflecting narrative and the poetry of individual passion had been perfected, but it still remained to add to events and sentiment the substance of ideas produced by analysis of life and its motives, and to recombine the whole into dramatic action, framed to exhibit in a subtle form "philosophy teaching by example."

The elements of that drama which supplied the want can be readily traced. Homeric legend provided an inexhaustible variety of elevated personages and tragic events. The iambists and lyrists had brought language and metre into a shape well adapted for simple yet poetical expression of common subjects. A mimetic element had been long growing up in the dithyrambic and phallic festivities of Dorian Greece, and perhaps still more in the recitations of those Homeric rhapsodists, who, as appears from the Ion of Plato, must have been in a manner actors as well as reciters, embodying in their own persons the characters whose deeds they recounted. Lastly, before the time of Æschylus Ionian philosophy had arisen in Greece with its free subtle and profound speculations on nature on causes and on thought. But the stages of advance in the combination of these elements into a harmonious form of composition are very obscure. Aristotle tells us merely that tragedy originated with the sallies of the

leaders of dithyrambs, and comedy with those of the phallic dancers; that Æschylus added a second personage or actor, and subordinated the choric to the iambic or conversational part; and that Sophocles introduced a third actor and painted scenery. But whatever was the order of the improvements, all of them were made by Athenian poets. The period of the glory of the drama extends from about 480 to about 300 B.C.; for the first sixty of which years tragedy held the first place, for the rest comedy. In both, Athens which had hardly appeared in the first two periods, stood not merely first, but alone.

Throughout the tragic period new plays were perpetually exhibited at Athens from year to year in unceasing succession and ever new variety. At every exhibition each contending poet brought into the field at least three new tragedies, followed by a satyric play (the link between the dithyrambs of the preceding and the comedies of the following age): and the same poets contended generally every other, sometimes every, year. Æschylus is said to have produced seventy tragedies, besides satyric after-pieces, Sophocles and Euripides a hundred and thirteen and ninety-two plays, respectively; and there were many other poets, in some cases equally or even more fertile, and who, though agreed to have been on the whole inferior to the three, were not seldom victorious over them on particular occasions. Of all these there remain to us only seven plays of Æschylus, seven of Sophocles, and nineteen of Euripides: but of this number several are acknowledged master-pieces, and collectively they enable us to trace the course of the successive changes of spirit and form in which tragedy reflected the changes of philosophy and society. Though the subjects (says Mr. Grote *), persons, and events of tragedy always continued to be borrowed from the legendary world, and were thus kept above the level of contemporaneous life-yet the dramatic manner of handling them is sensibly modified, even in Sophoklês as compared with Æschylus-and still more in Euripidês, by the atmosphere of democracy, political and judicial contention, and philosophy, encompassing and acting on the poet.

* History of Greece, VIII. p. 441.