own city, his 'mother' Thebes, must have caused him a pang as bitter as a great soul has ever borne.
For his very profession 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 profession 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 Sophokles, 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
