but as it were en passant, and usually by means of allusions, sufficient, no doubt, pleasantly to remind the victor and his friends of circumstances with which they were already familiar, but conveying little information to readers who know of these circumstances no more than the Ode itself tells them. Generally from the briefest notice of these points which would satisfy the poet's sense of the compliments due from him to his patron's achievements, the Ode passes with all convenient speed to a wholly different range of topics—to legends of ancient gods and heroes, moral reflections on every circumstance of human life, from the cradle to the grave, expositions and justifications of religious, social, and political creeds, from all which the poet only returns at rare intervals, and, as it were, perfunctorily, to his professed theme—the actual occasion of his poem.
These occasions were of every conceivable kind. Every circumstance of Greek life, civic or private, gave opportunity for a Choral Ode. The love of pomp and ceremonial was one of the most marked features in the national character of the Greeks; and in all their ceremonies an indispensable and prominent element was that of Music, in that wide sense in which the Greeks always used this term, including under it Poetry and the Dance. Was a temple to be founded, a magistrate to be installed, a distinguished athlete welcomed home from a successful visit to Olympia or the Isthmus, a local deity to be honoured at the annual recurrence of his festival,—the talents of the choric poet were at once in requisition. Kings and free
