SOURCE: "Some Aspects of Pindar's Style." ne Sewanee Review, Vol. 31, No. 1,January-March, 1923, pp. 100-110.

In the essay below, Baker discusses the figurative language, meters, rhetoric, and myths that comprise the style of Pindar's odes."

There was once a time when Pindar was regarded by moderns as a queer jumble of contests, of gnomic sayings, of myths, and of almost arrogant self-esteem. The blending of all these elements—if not the very reason for presenting them in poetry at all—was not easily to be explained; and men long held, therefore, that Pindar was not only difficult but also of questionable value. The discovery of the works of Bacchylides, in 1896, however, helped greatly to change this feeling. Bacchylides is far easier to follow than is Pindar, and very much more translucent; therefore he furnished a simpler model whereby to study Pindar's department, namely that of Choral-Lyric—the lyric written...