Corinna of Tanagra. The story there related of her playful rebuke, "One should sow with the hand, and not with the sack," exhibits the poetess in the character of a good-natured superior. Other legends tell of a rivalry between them: we hear of musical contests in which Corinna was declared victor,—five times in succession, says Ælian;[1] "whereupon"—adds this author with delicious gravity—"he called her a pig!" Pausanias[2] suggests that the good looks of the lady had something to do with the judges' verdict; but remarks, too, that they may have preferred her dialect, as easier and more familiar, to Pindar's super-accurate Doric. A third and hardly consistent tradition tells us that Corinna blamed another poetess called Myrtis for daring, in spite of her sex, to enter the lists against Pindar.
At the age of twenty (B.C. 502) Pindar's reputation as a rising poet seems to have been fairly established. A prize in the Pythian games had fallen to a young Thessalian named Hippocleas, and a noble countryman of the victor, a member of the almost royal house of the Aleuadæ, invited Pindar to celebrate the success in a Choral Ode. This circumstance produced the Tenth Pythian, the earliest of Pindar's extant Odes. It exhibits little or no trace of the heedless youthful exuberance reprehended by Corinna in his earlier efforts. Its mythological element, if not introduced with quite the dexterity which delights us in his finest poems, is yet not excessive, and is pleasing in itself. Pleasing also is the address of the young poet to his
