"Theirs is the crafty fox's mood;
Yet what, the while, such gainful cunning's gain?
Like loaded nets they drudge beneath the main—
I, the buoyant cork, that rides unscathed above the flood!"
And he adds that he knows his friends and his foes, and will love the one, and dart like a wolf upon the other.
The Third Pythian also expresses a wish to visit Hiero (about B.C. 474), and Boeckh thinks it probable that this wish was carried out next year, and that the First Nemean to Chromius (B.C. 473), the First Olympian to Hiero, and the Twelfth Olympian to Ergoteles (both probably B.C. 472), were composed by Pindar in Sicily.
Yet the external evidence for this visit is extremely slight. The sojourn of Simonides and Bacchylides at Hiero's court is attested on good authority: not so that of Pindar. And it is at least remarkable, though it seems to have escaped the notice of commentators, that Xenophon's imaginary dialogue "Hiero," composed certainly within a century of Pindar's death,[1] and exhibiting the most complete extant picture of the intercourse between Hiero and Simonides, says not a word of any visit to Hiero from Pindar.
The legends of Olympia, which Pindar has introduced into his Odes, comprise (1) the adventures of Pelops; (2) the institution of the contests by Heracles at the tomb of Pelops, the planting and naming of Mount Cronius, and the introduction of the olive-trees which supplied the crown; (3) the first celebra-
- ↑ Xenophon can hardly have been born later than B.C. 442, the supposed year of Pindar's death.
