to age, and one generation is amused where another is impressed.
The profusion of metaphor in Pindar's poetry is remarkable, and his analogies are often happy in the extreme. Sometimes, however, they strike us as strained, and not unfrequently (it must be owned) as commonplace. Some notion of his resources in this respect might be conveyed by a list of the objects to which from time to time he compares his own poetry. Among them are flowers, dew, honey, wine, gold, ivory, coral, palaces, merchandise, winds, paths, sandals, chains, and so forth ad libitum. He speaks of himself, in figures drawn from the sports which he describes, as wrestling with his theme, as hurling his dart beyond those of all competitors, as launching his quoit fairly without overstepping the "touch-line." Now he is shooting arrows that strike but never wound, now he is rearing a storehouse filled with costly treasures, now he is outdoing the statuary's art by the creation of images that move and breathe, now he is ploughing the fields of the Muses, now he is preparing medicine for the athlete's hurts or a bath to refresh his weary limbs. Much of all this, no doubt, is trite now, and was not new then. Pindar is fond of asserting his originality, but probably his claim refers rather to the employment of his materials than to the selection of them. Still, if the quality of his metaphors does not always impress us, we cannot but be struck by their mere profusion, and the boldness with which he handles them.
The rapidity of language, which is so marked a
