[Footnote 1:  The Pentathlon.  See Introduction to Ol. xiii, and note on Nem. vii, p. 129.]

[Footnote 2:  Rivers were [Greek:  kourotrophoi] (nurturers of youth), and thus young men who had achieved bodily feats were especially bound to return thanks to the streams of their native places.]

[Footnote 3:  In Lakonia.]

[Footnote 4:  Asopodoros seems to have been banished from Thebes and kindly received in his banishment by Orchomenos.]

[Footnote 5:  Here, as elsewhere probably in the special sense of a poet.]

[Footnote 6:  Herakles and Iolaos.]

[Footnote 7:  Orchomenos.]

II.

For Xenokrates of Akragas,

Winner in the chariot-race.

* * * * *

This is the same winner for whom the sixth Pythian ode was written.  Its date would seem to be 476, while that of the sixth Pythian was 494.  Yet the opening passage of this ode seems to imply that Xenokiates’ son Thrasyboulos was still little more than a boy, whereas in 494 he had been old enough to be his father’s charioteer, and this would be eighteen years later.  But perhaps the passage is only an allusion to Thrasyboulos’ boyhood as a time past.  And certainly both Xenokrates and his brother Theron seem to be spoken of in this ode as already dead, and we know that Theron did not die till 473.  Perhaps therefore Thrasyboulos was celebrating in 472 the anniversary of his deceased father’s victory, four years after the victory itself.

* * * * *

The men of old, Thrasyboulos, who went up into the Muse’s car to give welcome with the loud-voiced lyre, lightly for honour of boys shot forth their honey-sounding songs, whensoever in one fair of form was found that sweetest summer-bloom that turneth hearts to think on fair-throned Aphrodite.

For then the Muse was not yet covetous nor a hireling, neither were sweet lays tender-voiced sold with silvered faces by Terpsichore of honeyed speech.  But now doth she bid heed the word of the Argive man[1] which keepeth nigh to the paths of truth: 

‘Money, money maketh man,’ he said, when robbed of goods at once and friends.

Forasmuch as thou art wise it is nothing hidden to thee that I sing, while I do honour to the Isthmian victory won by speed of horses, which to Xenokrates did Poseidon give, and sent to him a wreath of Dorian parsley to bind about his hair, a man of goodly chariot, a light of the people of Akragas.

Also at Krisa did far-prevailing Apollo look upon him, and gave him there too glory:  and again when he attained unto the crowns of the Erectheidai in shining Athens he found no fault in the chariot-saving hand of the man Nikomachos who drave his horses, the hand wherewith in the instant of need he bare on all the reins[2].