"As who would frame some gorgeous hall, uproars its porch with shapely wall
On golden pillars hung:
Our song's proud front must glitter from afar."
And then an allusion to the victor's success, and the sacerdotal honours of his family at Syracuse and Olympia, suggests a comparison of him to the hero-prophet Amphiaraus, "warrior both and seer," whose death, foreseen of himself, had deprived the famous Seven against Thebes of the very "eye" of their expedition.
But the poet will not linger on this theme. With an apostrophe of amazing vigour and originality he calls on Phintias, the victor's charioteer, to yoke his mules for a new course. But it is not the mere material car, with which they had triumphed at Olympia, that they are now to draw. They are to be attached to a nobler chariot—the ideal car of the Muses. Their victory has, as it were, "sublimated their essence," and raised them into ideal beings, suitable for the ideal task demanded of them. So then through the gates of Song, whose bars fly back to admit them, the spiritualised mules and the spiritual chariot must pass, and bear the poet far away to Pitanè.
Pitanè was in sober fact a suburb or parish of Sparta; but Pindar's present purpose was not a visit to the city beside the Eurotas. In ancient Greece, as in modern Cornwall, nine-tenths of the names of places were believed to be derived from legendary saints, or, as the Greeks called them, heroes, whose shrines or tombs were still exhibited to believers as evidence for
