It is wholly impossible, within the limits of the present work, to attempt more than the most brief allusion to the light which the Odes of Pindar throw on the moral and theological ideas of his day. The reader who wishes to pursue this most interesting subject will find, in an admirable treatise by a modern German scholar,[1] a full and systematic exposition of the poet's Philosophy of Life in all its branches. He will find that it is possible to gather into a remarkably complete and coherent body of doctrine the numerous moral maxims and religious speculations which are scattered through the Pindaric Odes, composed though these were at varying intervals in the course of a long life. In this respect, as in others, Pindar's intellect seems to have reached its full growth prior to the production of his earliest extant poem. As an artist, his conception of his art, and the technical processes by which he produced his effects, were practically the same at every stage of his career—unmodified either by development from within, or by influences from without. As a theologian and a moralist, he seems in like manner to have adopted early, and once for all, a comprehensive and consistent theory, which remained thenceforth the background of his whole religious and ethical teaching.
Space only remains to indicate in a few words a single phase of this philosophy,—the view involved in it of success within an appropriate sphere as the true aim and ideal of every noble life.
- ↑ Buchholz, Die sittliche Weltanschauung des Pindaros u. Æschylos. Leipzig: 1869.
