in this last the mythical element is insignificant). No such unity can be said to characterise the Olympian or the Pythian group. In each of these, however, a particular series of legends stands prominently forward in neither case, indeed, occupying the whole or nearly the whole of the book, but in each case extending through several Odes of exceptional beauty and importance, and so forming a marked and salient feature. In the Olympian Odes, this prominence belongs to the local legends of Olympia; in the Pythian, to those of the distant colony Cyrenè, and its ruling family the Battiadæ. The legends of Olympia take up three out of the fourteen Olympian Odes, and each of these three is addressed to a victor from the western colonies of Greece in Italy and Sicily. We have already suggested a reason for this circumstance. The great houses of Sicily were greater in the present than in the past, and the poet may probably have felt that, in dwelling upon their magnificent present position and calling attention to the glorious associations of their Olympian victories, he was paying them a more welcome as well as a more sincere compliment, than he could have done by referring to family or national antecedents, which had been eclipsed by more recent glories. Still we must not suppose that all allusion to ancestral legends is excluded from the Odes addressed to Sicilians. The Second Olympian Ode, addressed to Thero of Acragas, or Agrigentum, traces the victor's family back to the great mythical house of the Theban Labdacidæ, and illustrates the vicissitudes of its history by parallels
