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 history has made us somewhat prone to forget the importance of non-Athenian elements in the complex whole of Hellenic life and thought.  Athens was the eye of Hellas, nay, she had at Marathon and Salamis made good her claim to be called the saving arm, but there were other members not to be forgotten if we would picture to ourselves the national body in its completeness.

Pindar was a Boeotian, of a country not rich in literary or indeed any kind of intellectual eminence, yet by no means to be ignored in an estimate of the Hellenic race.  Politically indeed it only rises into pre-eminence under Epameinondas; before and afterwards Boeotian policy under the domination of Thebes is seldom either beneficent or glorious:  it must be remembered, however, that the gallant Plataeans also were Boeotians.  The people of Boeotia seem to have had generally an easy, rather sensually inclined nature, which accorded with their rich country and absence of nautical and commercial enterprise and excitement, but in their best men this disposition remains only in the form of a genial simplicity.  Pelopidas in political, and Plutarch and Pausanias in literary history, will be allowed to be instances of this.  That the poetry which penetrated Hellenic life was not wanting in Boeotia we have proof enough in the existence of the Sacred Band, that goodly fellowship of friends which seems to have united what Hallam has called the three strongest motives to enthusiastic action that have appeared in history, patriotism, chivalric honour, and religion.  Nor is there any nobler figure in history than that of Epameinondas.