. For the
magnificent Sicilian princes, Hieron of Syracuse and Theron of
Akragas, not unlike the Medici in the position they held, Pindar wrote
five of the longest of his extant odes, and probably visited them in
Sicily. But he would not quit his home to be an ornament of their
courts. When asked why he did not, like Simonides, accept the
invitations of these potentates to make his home with them, he
answered that he had chosen to live his own life, and not to be the
property of another. He died at the age of 79, that is, probably, in
the year 443, twelve years before the Peloponnesian war began. Legend
said that he died in the theatre of Argos, in the arms of Theoxenos,
the boy in whose honour he wrote a Skolion of which an immortal
fragment remains to us. Other myths gathered round his name. It was
said that once when in childhood he had fallen asleep by the way 'a
bee had settled on his lips and gathered honey,' and again that
'he saw in a dream that his mouth was filled with honey and the
honeycomb;' that Pan himself learnt a poem of his and rejoiced to sing
it on the mountains; that finally, while he awaited an answer from
the oracle of Ammon, whence he had enquired what was best for man,
Persephone appeared to him in his sleep and said that she only of the
gods had had no hymn from him, but that he should make her one shortly
when he had come to her; and that he died within ten days of the
vision.

Two several conquerors of Thebes, Pausanias of Sparta and Alexander of
Macedon,

'bade spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground.'

At Delphi they kept with reverence his iron chair, and the priest of
Apollo cried nightly as he closed the temple, 'Let Pindar the poet go
in unto the supper of the god.'

Thus Pindar was contemporary with an age of Greek history which
justifies the assertion of his consummate interest for the student of
Hellenic life in its prime. It was impossible that a man of his
genius and temperament should have lived through these times without
representing to us with breadth and intensity the spirit that was in
them, and there are several points in Pindar's circumstances which
make his relation to his age peculiarly interesting. We may look on
him as in some points supplementary to the great Athenian dramatists,
whose works are doubtless far the most valuable literary legacy of the
time. Perhaps however the surpassing brilliance of Athenian literature
and hi