CHAPTER IV.
THE FOUR GREAT GAMES.
With but few exceptions, the extant Odes of Pindar are devoted to the celebration of equestrian and athletic successes at one or other of four great national festivals. Fragments of his other writings show that he excelled in every branch of choral poetry; but of all his works, the Epinicia or Triumphal Odes were those which ancient critics most admired, and it is by these alone that modern readers can test his claim to a place among the great poets of the world.
Voltaire, it is said,[1] once made a great attempt to understand Pindar. But the gorge of the fastidious philosopher rose at the first crude notion which he formed of the subject-matter of the Odes, and of Pindar's relations with his royal patrons. He saw in Pindar only "an unintelligible and bombastic Theban, a poet of the boxing-ring, the first violin of King Hiero!" Eminent Frenchmen, when they give their minds to it, do contrive to express strange opinions on the literature of foreign nations, and of antiquity.
