in the spirit of the Delphic movement in religion, the defensive reformation from the inside. Pindar is a moralist: parenthetical preaching is his favourite form of ornament; it comes in perfunctorily, like the verbal quibbles and assonances of Shakespeare. But the essence of his morality has not advanced much beyond Hesiod; save that where hesiod tells his peasant to work and save, Pindar exhorts his nobleman to seek for honour and be generous. His ideal is derived straight from the Dorian aristocratic tradition. You must start by being well-born and brave and strong. You must then do two things, work and spend: work with body and soul; spend time and money and force, in pursuit of ἀρετὰ, 'goodness.' And what is 'goodness'? The sum of the qualities of the true Dorian man, descended from the god-born, labouring, fearless, unwearied fighter against the enemies of gods and men, Heracles. It is not absolutely necessary to be rich-there were poor Spartans; nor good-looking-some of his prize boxers were probably the reverse. But honour and renown you must have. Eccentric commentators have even translated ἀρετὰ as 'success in games'-which it implied, much as the ideal of a mediaeval knight implied success in the tourney.
Pindar is not false to this ideal. The strange air of abject worldliness which he sometimes wears, comes not because his idealism forsakes him, but because he has no sense of fact. The thing he loved was real heroism. But he could not see it out of its traditional setting; and when the setting was there, his own imagination sufficed to create the heroism. He was moved by the holy splendour of Delphi and Olympia; he liked the sense of distinction and remoteness from the vulgar [114]
