Particularly noticeable are the number and importance of those odes which belong to the years immediately following the Persian wars. The writer of epinikia, like the sculptor of athletic statues, was by the very nature of his art Panhellenic. His muse, as Pindar tells us, was a hireling. He wrote for those who could pay him best, for the wealthy nobles of Thessaly or Aegina, or the princes of Sicily. Neither in Ceos nor in Thebes could a poet find sufficient scope for his genius. The little island of Ceos, famed for its athletes and its music, lay somewhat outside the main currents of Greek life. Thebes had fallen from her legendary greatness, and played but an inglorious part in the Persian wars. Hence, though the poets turned with special tenderness and pride to sing of the victors of their native cities, they spent much of their lives at the courts of powerful patrons, and found their highest inspiration in that burst of Panhellenic feeling that the Persian wars produced, and which for the moment united in the service of Hellas tyrant and oligarch and people. If Theban Pindar could not, like Simonides, sing of those who fell at Thermopylae or Salamis, his patriotism found vent in no less than six odes in honour of the victors in the great national celebration at Olympia in 476 B.C.
The defeat of Persia not only gave a fresh impulse to the Panhellenic festivals: it raised athletic training into a national duty. The consciousness of a great danger safely past arouses a nation to a sense of its military and physical needs. We can remember only a few years ago the growth of rifle clubs, the cry for military and physical training that followed the Boer war. The danger, it is felt at such times, may occur again, and it behoves every citizen to be ready to play his part. Among the Greeks this feeling gathered force not from any consciousness of their own shortcomings, but from a consciousness of their superiority. At Marathon the Greeks of the mainland had for the first time found themselves face to face with the Orientals, and for the first time realized the gulf that separated them from themselves. Their triumph was the triumph of freedom and law over slavery and despotism. A handful of free citizens had defeated a horde of slaves, and this result was due in no small degree to their athletic training. Witness the famous charge of Marathon. Critics may throw doubt on its truth: it is sufficient that Herodotus supposed it possible. An army charging a distance of eight furlongs over ground that would try any cross-country runner! No wonder the Persians regarded the Greeks as madmen. The mere existence of such a story is proof enough of the athletic training of the nation. Moreover, the sight of the long-haired, effeminate Persians, whose bodies were not hardened by exercise and tanned by exposure to the air, seems to have impressed itself indelibly on the national imagination. Hence the extraordinary popularity during the years that followed of all those military and athletic exercises which we see so constantly depicted on the red-figured vases. We must remember that at Athens this training was for the most part voluntary. It was only during the two years’ training of the epheboi that the state undertook the education of its members. Yet from this time the palaestra and gymnasium became the resort of all classes and all ages. And what was true of Athens, was true, we may feel sure, of the rest of Greece. For a time Athenian influence prevailed everywhere. The old Spartan pre-eminence had passed away, and even in athletics Athens had become the school of Greece. If Athens produced few victors in the games, she at least set an example in physical training. “Meet is it that from Athens a fashioner of athletes come,” says Pindar of the Athenian Menander who trained Pytheas of Aegina for a Nemean victory, won probably in 481 or 479 B.C.[114] The effect of this national athletic movement is seen in the great games. The lists of the victors at Olympia, or the lists of those for whom Bacchylides and Pindar sang, are representative of the length and breadth of Greece from Rhodes to Agrigentum, from Cyrene to Thasos.[115] Finally, the national rejoicing over the victory of Plataea could find no fitter expression than the founding, at that city, of a new athletic festival, the Eleutheria.
Before we consider the individual writers of epinikia two points may be noticed which are common to all poems of this class. In the first place, the epinikion was essentially Panhellenic in its theme and also in its structure. The hymn itself consisted of three parts—an allusion to the victory, a legend suggested by the victor’s home or lineage, or by the locality of the festival, and some moral reflections or advice. The heroes and gods of the legends had for the most part lost their local character and become the common property of the race, and the poet, by coupling the present with the past, thereby proclaimed the continuity and unity of Hellas. Secondly, the epinikion was aristocratic. The victors whom the poet praised were princes and nobles, who competed for pure love of sport, and for whom athletics were in no sense a profession, nor even the chief occupation of their lives. Life was not all sport in Greece at this period, and these men did not shirk their duties, but played their part with honour in the more serious contests of war and politics.
Of the epinikia of Simonides only a few fragments survive. To these we may add several epigrams of somewhat doubtful authenticity. Little more was known of Bacchylides till a few years ago the discovery of an Egyptian papyrus by Drs. Grenfell and Hunt restored to us, besides other poems, large portions of thirteen of his epinikia. Bacchylides came from an island of athletes: his own family seems to have been athletic, his grandfather is said to have been distinguished as an athlete, and his uncle was the poet Simonides. He dwells with intense delight on the details of the games, the light foot and strong hands of the victor, the whirlwind rush of the chariots, the cheers of the spectators, the triumphal rejoicings at the victor’s home. But of the deeper meaning, the spirit of the games, we learn little from him.
With Pindar it is different. He is a prophet with a theory of life which he applies to everything of which he sings, to the stories of gods and heroes, or to the deeds of men. He has, too, a high conception of the poet’s office, which is to give to all excellence that immortal fame which should be the chief incentive to all noble deeds. It has been said that to be an athlete and the father of athletes is for Pindar the highest reach of human ambition. The criticism is unfair for two reasons. In the first place, it takes account only of a portion of Pindar’s work. He is said to have written poems of ten different classes, most of them connected with the worship of the gods. Of nine of these classes we possess but a few fragments; only the epinikia have survived. In the epinikia the poet’s theme is necessarily the praise of winners at the games, in other words the praise of youth, and early manhood. But Pindar himself recognizes clearly that every age has its own excellence. The virtues of the old are good counsel and prudence, those of youth are courage and endurance. “By trial is the issue manifest,”[116] and the virtues of youth are proved in battle,[117] or in the peaceful contests of the games, which are, as we have seen, the training of the citizen for the sterner contests of war. Secondly, the word “athlete” is ambiguous. It suggests too much the professional athlete of a later age, the man who, from selfish and mercenary motives, devoted his whole life to athletics and who, as Euripides tells us, was after his prime “useless as a worn-out coat.” But the well-born youths and princes for whom Pindar sang were actuated by no mercenary motives, but by that pure love of physical effort and of competition which is natural to all healthy youth. “The shepherd, and the ploughman, the fowler, and he whom the sea feedeth, strive but to keep fierce famine from their bellies; but whoso in the games or in war hath won delightful fame, receiveth the highest of rewards in fair words of citizens and of strangers.”[118]
What then are the qualities of Pindar’s athlete? They are summed up in that most typical of all his athletic odes, the 11th Olympian, in honour of Agesidamus of Epizephyrian Locri, the winner of the boys’ boxing match in the great Ol. 76. “If one be born with