days, was drawing near to ripe perfection, the art of sculpture.
§ 23. The period of Pindar's activity (502 to 452 B.C.) coincides with the close of that period in Greek sculpture which immediately preceded the culmination of the art under Pheidias. To take Overbeck's broad division, we have:—(i) The early age, to 460 B.C.; its second period being from about 540 to 460: (2) The age of maturity, 460 to 300 B.C.; its second period being from about 396 to 300. From a slightly different point of view, we might close the archaic age at 500 B.C., and regard 500 to 460 B.C. as a distinct period, that in which the schools of Argos, Sicyon, and Aegina were effecting the transition from archaic types. And this is precisely the age to which most of Pindar's extant odes belong.
The central link between Pindar's poetry and Greek sculpture is Olympia. The earliest Greek plastic art was directly and exclusively the handmaid of religion: the god and the demigod were considered the only proper subjects for its exercise. But as the glory of the Olympian festival grew, as the worship of the Olympian Zeus became more and more a national bond among all Hellenes, an Olympian victor was raised to a rank so eminent that it seemed no longer irreverent to pay him an honour similar to that which was rendered to ἡμίθεοι: especially as this honour was in some sort rendered, not merely to the man, but also to the gods and demigods of Oiympia. Hence, in the course of the sixth century B.C., sculpture was already
