and of marvellous signs of divine favour towards him manifested in his lifetime, and even after his death.
It seemed desirable also that the reader should form some preliminary idea of the great demand for choral poetry among the Greeks of Pindar's day, and the qualifications needed by a poet in order to supply that demand adequately. Such qualifications would include a familiar knowledge, both practical and theoretical, of the whole range of poetical, musical, and spectacular art, and of the methods by which each branch could be made to co-operate most successfully in producing a required effect. Further, the mythological treatment of his themes demanded from the poet a minute and comprehensive acquaintance with the whole body of Greek divinity, including not merely the legends common to the whole people, and the established articles of mythological belief stereotyped once for all by a Homer or a Hesiod, but the floating local traditions of every petty tribe, and town, and even family. And from this vast store he had to select with infinite tact and discretion, topics, not only suitable to his occasion, but adapted to please a mixed audience, whose peculiar religious and political prejudices and theories of orthodoxy in matters mythological he could not with impunity disregard. On two points at least we shall have gained light by considering the combination of gifts and training necessary to produce such artists, and the wide field of occupation which, would be open to them when they appeared, For so we shall better understand how it was, that—unlike most Greek literary men of that day, unlike the great
