We have to thank a similar accident for the preservation of the one extant Ode of Pindar which was not composed to celebrate an equestrian or athletic triumph —the so-called Eleventh Nemean—the Installation Ode (to which reference has more than once been made), for Aristagoras, "President" of Tenedos. Aristagoras had been in his day a distinguished athlete, and the frequent allusions of the Ode to his successes have occasioned the mistake which has preserved it.
The closing stanzas of this poem—like those of the Ninth Olympian described above—afford a specimen of Pindar's quasi-philosophical speculation on the problems of life. If the attainment of success be the result of an innate and inherited capacity for success, how comes it that the annals of a given family contain the record of failures as well as of successes? This difficulty Pindar meets with the favourite argument of poets—an analogy. The procreative capacities of Nature do not operate continuously through time: summer alternates with winter, fields lie fallow in certain years, blossom succeeds to bud, and fruit to blossom. So is it with the inborn gifts, which at stated intervals generate success.
"But not in every age successive born
Doth its full strength ancestral virtue show,
Nor year by year with crops of golden corn
Doth the rich furrow glow;
Nor are the laden trees unfailing drest
With their sweet burthen hour by hour,
Swoln bud and fragrant flower,
But all alike they own alternate wealth and rest.
E'en so alternate is the race of man."—(S.)
