tragedians and historians of Athens—the choral poets almost of necessity adopted their art as a regular profession, and derived from it, not fame alone, but a substantial livelihood. We shall also better understand the value set by their countrymen on the few really eminent professors of so difficult an art, and the eagerness of patrons to secure their services. And thus we shall be prepared to believe the stories preserved to us by Pindar's biographers, of kings and governments vying with each other to do the poet honour, and establishing with him relations of personal and quasi-political friendship.
We must accept the main outlines of Pindar's life as they are related by the somewhat questionable authorities to whom we owe all our evidence on the subject.
Pindar, they tell us, was a Bœotian, born either in Thebes or in an adjacent village, about the year B.C. 522. By a singular coincidence, the great master of the Dorian lyre was born during the celebration of the Pythia, the quinquennial festival of Apollo, the God of Delphi, whom the Greeks worshipped as the especial patron of Dorian nationality, of poetry, and especially of the lyre. This coincidence is known to us from Pindar's own express statement,[1] and it is almost the only fact of his life which can be regarded as unquestionably ascertained. His father's name was apparently Daiphantus, for Scopelinus, whom some authors treat as the poet's father, seems really to have been an uncle or stepfather who superintended his early musical edu-
- ↑ Fr. 205 (Boeckh).
