abandoned. It has served the immediate purpose for which it was introduced, and the poet springs at once to another theme. Often, too, a poem contains not one myth, but many, and these are interwoven with one another and with the other materials of the Ode in the most singular, and at first sight unintelligible, fashion. One legend passes into another, like the stories of the 'Arabian Nights;' the scene shifts from Troy to Salamis, and from Salamis to Thessaly; and from the adventures of the successive inhabitants of Rhodes, we are flung centuries back into an age when not as yet—
"Towered the Rhodian isle conspicuous over Ocean's waves, but still
Deep it lay beneath the whelming brine." [1]
Or the "tale of Troy" has been referred to,[2] and we are expecting to hear some well-known feat of Achilles or Ajax; but no! it is "the form of Lycian Glaucus" who appears before the Greeks, and "tells them all with pride" of his Corinthian ancestry; and so follows legend after legend of the Corinthian hero Bellerophon, apparently introduced "without rhyme or reason," but really the very legends which Pindar had all along been preparing to introduce, in honour of the Corinthian athlete whose victory he is at the moment celebrating.
Sometimes the only visible link between a myth and the context to which it is attached is so transparently inadequate to bear the weight laid upon it, as almost to suggest the idea that the poet is purposely playing with his subject. Thus in the First Isthmian,
