tion of the Olympic festival, and the winners of its earliest prizes; (4) the transference by Heracles to the Tyndarids, Castor and Polydeuces (or Pollux), of his self-chosen duty of superintending the games, when his own deification removed him to another sphere. These legends are embodied in the First, Third, and Eleventh Olympian Odes, which may now be considered briefly in succession.
The First Olympian Ode was written for Hiero, and commemorates his success in the horse-race with a horse bearing the appropriate name of Pherenicus, or "the victor." It opens with the oft-quoted maxim, "Best is water,"[1] and proceeds at once to the occasion of the Ode. Water is the first of boons, gold the first of treasures, and Olympia the first of festivals. Olympia it is that wakes our lays, as we approach the happy home of Hiero!
Then follows a picture of that home, its magnificence and culture, and an allusion (apparently) to the poet's personal knowledge of it.
"With rod of righteousness the fields he sways
Of pastoral Sicily, and culls the prime
Of virtue, while around him blaze
The brightest flowers of rhyme,
Such festal lays as oft we wake
Around his board."
Then the victorious racer is set before us—
"As by Alphëus' banks he sped.
No need of spur—on, on he flies!
And bears his master toward the prize."
- ↑ Repeated in Ol. iii. 44.
