BY

Ernest Myers, M.A.

Sometime Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford

1904

First edition printed 1874.

Reprinted (with corrections) 1884, 1888, 1892, 1895, 1899, 1904

  Son of the lightning, fair and fiery star,
  strong-winged Imperial pindar, voice divine,
  let these deep draughts of thy enchanted wine
  lift me with thee in SOARINGS high and far
  prouder than PEGASEAN, or the car
  wherein Apollo rapt the huntress maid. 
  So let me Range mine hour, too soon to fade
  into strange presence of the things that are. 
  Yet know that even amid this jarring noise
  of hates, loves, Creeds, together heaped and hurled,
  some Echo faint of grace and grandeur stirs
  from thy sweet Hellas, home of noble joys. 
  First fruit and best of all our Western world;
  WHATE’ER we hold of beauty, half is hers.

INTRODUCTION.

Probably no poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar finds so few and so infrequent readers.  The causes are not far to seek:  in the first and most obvious place comes the great difficulty of his language, in the second the frequent obscurity of his thought, resulting mainly from his exceeding allusiveness and his abrupt transitions, and in the third place that amount of monotony which must of necessity attach to a series of poems provided for a succession of similar occasions.

It is as an attempt towards obviating the first of these hindrances to the study of Pindar, the difficulty of his language, that this translation is of course especially intended.  To whom and in what cases are translations of poets useful?  To a perfect scholar in the original tongue they are superfluous, to one wholly ignorant of it they are apt to be (unless here and there to a Keats) meaningless, flat, and puzzling.  There remains the third class of those who have a certain amount of knowledge of a language, but not enough to enable them to read unassisted its more difficult books without an expenditure of time and trouble which is virtually prohibitive.  It