to the life after death as a period of probation, and of an "atonement accepted by Persephone," the awful mistress of the lower world. And elsewhere doubtless he introduced pictures of souls awaiting at the tribunals of Æacus and Rhadamanthus that unerring and inevitable sentence which should award to them, according to their works, an eternity of bliss or torment. And if the subject of a dirge had been an Æginetan of some great Æacid house, he would naturally (we may imagine) pass on to trace the legendary career of the hero, who had exchanged the sovereignty of Ægina for a judgment-seat in the nether world, and would show how the justice of his earthly life had fitted him to discharge the awful duties of judging the spirits in prison.
The Hyporchema or Mimic-dance seems to have been considered as a lighter and livelier style of composition than the Hymn or the Pæan. Yet its performance was connected with the services of religion; it was exhibited on occasions where we should rather have expected the performance of a Pæan, to avert the dreaded consequences of some supposed portent; it invoked the favour of deities, and related the adventures of heroes. One fragment of a Pindaric Hyporchema appears to narrate some exploit of Heracles (Hercules) of a literally bloodthirsty character.
"He drank them mingled in blood,"[1]
it begins, and then comes a description of the blows of his club "crushing through bones and marrow."
- ↑ Fr. 77 (Boeckh).
