One fact indeed there is which must always make the thought of Pindar’s Theban citizenship painful to us, and that is the shameful part taken by Thebes in the Persian war, when compulsion of her exposed situation, and oligarchical cabal within her walls, drew her into unholy alliance with the barbarian invader.  Had it been otherwise how passionately pure would Pindar’s joy have uttered itself when the ‘stone of Tantalos’ that hung over the head of Hellas was smitten into dust in that greatest crisis of the fortunes of humanity.  He exults nobly as it is, he does all honour to Athens, ‘bulwark of Hellas,’ but the shame of his own city, his ‘mother’ Thebes, must have caused him a pang as bitter as a great soul has ever borne.

For his very calling of song-writer to all Hellenic states without discrimination, especially when the songs he had to write were of the class which we still possess, triumphal odes for victories in those great games which drew to them all men of Hellenic blood at the feet of common deities, and which with each recurring festival could even hush the clamour of war in an imperious Truce of God—­such a calling and such associations must have cherished in him the passion for Panhellenic brotherhood and unanimity, even had there not been much else both within and without him to join to the same generous end.  It was the time when Panhellenic feeling was probably stronger than ever before or after.  Before, the states had been occupied in building up their own polities independently; the Hellenic activity had been dispersing itself centrifugally among the trans-marine colonies, and those of Italy and Sicily seemed at one time to make it doubtful whether the nucleus of civilization were to be there or in the mother-country.  But by the time of the Persian war the best energies of the race had concentrated themselves between the Aegean and Ionian seas; and the supreme danger of the war had bound the states together against the common enemy and taught them to forget smaller differences in the great strife between Hellene and barbarian.  Yet again when that supreme danger was past the old quarrels arose anew more deadly and more complicated:  instead of a Persian there was a Peloponnesian war, and the Peloponnesian war in its latter stages came, by virtue of the political principles involved, to partake much of the character of a civil war.  But the time of Pindar, of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, of Pheidias, of Polygnotos, was that happy interval when Hellas had beaten off the barbarian from her throat and had not yet murdered herself.  And Pindar’s imagination and generosity were both kindled by the moment; there was no room in his mind for border squabbles, for commercial jealousies, for oligarchic or democratic envy:  these things were overridden by a sentiment of nationality wanting indeed in many circumstances which modern nationalities deem essential to the existence of such sentiment, and many of which are really essential to its permanence—­yet a sentiment which no other nation ever before or since can have possessed in the peculiar lustre which it then wore in Hellas; for no other nation has ever before or since known what it was to stand alone immeasurably advanced at the head of the civilization of the world.