Thebes, the native city of Pindar, continued to the last his home. There, beside the fountain of Dirce, the traditional site of his house was pointed out some six hundred years after the poet's death to the traveller Pausanias. Another Pausanias, it was said, had once sacked Thebes at the head of a Spartan army, but had spared the house which bore the inscription,
"Burn not the roof of Pindar the poet!"
Sober history indeed refutes this story. Pausanias did, it is true, in the year B.C. 395, lead a Spartan army against Thebes, but he retired baffled from before its walls, and forfeited his kingdom by his retreat. But there is no such reason for disbelieving the similar tale that the house of Pindar was spared by Alexander the Great,[1] when in B.C. 336 he destroyed Thebes, and sold its inhabitants into slavery. The English reader will remember the lines in which Milton has made this tale immortal:—
"The great Emathian conqueror bade spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground."[2]
In this house the poet lived and wrote, "drinking," as he tells us,[3] "the pleasant waters" of the sacred fountain hard by. Once at least his relations with the rulers of his city became unpleasantly strained. In a poem composed for an Athenian festival his compliments to Athens provoked the jealousy of the
