Pindar (Morice)/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
SICILY.—THE SYRACUSAN AND AGRIGENTINE DYNASTIES.
We saw in the last chapter that all the Odes embodying local legends of Olympia were addressed to Sicilians, and that two out of the three were addressed to Sicilian kings—Hiero of Syracuse and Thero of Acragas. Four other Odes were written by the poet for these princes—three for Hiero[1] and one for Thero;[2] and though these Odes are not connected by a common mythological substratum, it may be convenient to consider them together. We shall thus have before us a group of Odes illustrating Pindar's relations with the dynasties of Syracuse and Acragas; and this group may be completed by the addition of four more Odes, two[3] of which are addressed to Chromius, Hiero's viceroy in Ætna, and two[4] to kinsmen of Thero, Xenocrates and liis son Thrasybulus. In this group, as in all the Odes addressed to Sicilians, we shall find the poet less careful than usual to select his mythical illustrations from the national and family legends of his patrons. The practice which he here adopts is rather to select some topic of encomium or admonition suitable to the present circumstances of the person whom he is addressing, and then, irrespective of any further considerations, to choose from the rich stores of his mythological knowledge any legend which will serve to illustrate his point.
Thus in the Second Pythian, addressed to Hiero, the chief myth which the Ode contains is introduced solely with a didactic purpose. It is the tale of Ixion's twofold guilt, unnatural murder and unlawful love. The murder is briefly mentioned, but Pindar dwells at length on the criminal infatuation which induced Ixion to attempt an intrigue with the queen of the gods—Hera, the spouse of Zeus.
"Justly he suffered for his sin
A signal doom."
With bitter mockery of his presumptuous rival, Zeus caused a cloud to assume the shape of Hera; and then, in the moment of his fancied triumph, Ixion found himself hurled down to Tartarus, and suspended for ever in torment on a revolving wheel. The gods had admitted him to friendly intercourse with themselves, and he had abused their kindness. And now, says Pindar, his fate is a perpetual lesson to mankind
"That still should gratitude good deeds repay."
To explain the introduction of this legend, we must refer to the general moral teaching of the Ode, and to the knowledge which we obtain from other authorities as to the events of Hiero's life. Now the Ode, though full of lofty compliments to Hiero's natural capacities for virtue, abounds also in grave and pointed warnings against particular faults—jealousy, impatience, love of flattery, trust in evil counsellors, and the like. And it appears that the Ode was written at a time when Hiero's tendency to these defects seemed likely to lead him into serious guilt and disastrous folly. He had but just succeeded to his kingdom, and his brother Polyzelus held a position in it little, if at all, inferior in power to his own. Nay, by marrying the widow of the late king, Polyzelus had taken a step which, in the eyes of a jealous rival, might easily appear as a preliminary to the assertion of a claim to the throne. Yielding either to his own fears or to the suggestions of evil advisers, Hiero seems to have formed a scheme which recalls the Biblical narrative of David and Uriah. Polyzelus should be sent to perish in attacking a neighbouring city, and the queen should become the wife of Hiero. Polyzelus, however, was warned and fled. He appealed for protection to Thero of Acragas, the son and heir of his late brother's old comrade Ænesidamus, and his appeal was successful. A demand on Hiero's part for the extradition of Polyzelus was disregarded by Thero, and a war seemed imminent, but was somehow averted. We have already alluded to the story that the quarrel was appeased by the mediation of Pindar's rival, Simonides.
These events probably explain the mythical contents of the Second Pythian. Hiero's foolish and guilty designs on the wife of Polyzelus, the murderous scheme which his jealous fear of his brother suggested, the unseemliness of such a quarrel as seemed impending between the once friendly houses of Deinomenes and Ænesidamus—the rashness, the violence, and the disregard of natural ties and obligations involved in the whole transaction—are rebuked by implication in the poet's strictures on Ixion. Yet Pindar's warnings are conveyed with such tact that the Ode never ceases to seem an encomium. He dwells on the innate nobility of Hiero's character, and he urges the king to escape his temptations, not by becoming better, but by being what he is:—
"Learn thy true self, and live it!"
Flattery and evil counsels, he hints, are putting Hiero into a false position. Let him be himself, and no further reformation will be needed. Was ever an unpalatable warning conveyed with more consummate tact? The very reproach assumes the guise of a compliment. The censor is at the same time a panegyrist.
No less delicately does Pindar hint his disapproval of another defect in Hiero's character, a tendency to avarice. He enlarges, not on the evil effects of the vice, but on the advantages of the virtue which is its opposite, and contrives simultaneously to pay tribute to the magnificence of Hiero's position:—
"Wealth is thine, and bounty more may its powers unfold:
Sovereign thou of mighty nation, and tower-crowned town!
Boasteth any, that ever Hellas in days of old
Bare a son as peerless in wealth, or in high renown?
—Empty his vaunt, his labour lost!
I'll climb Song's flowery prow, and there recite
Thy valour's praise. Ever doth martial might
Youthful vigour glorify. The prouder, then, thy boast:
For not thy worth in wars alone, afoot or mounted, thou hast shown!
But riper Wisdom's renown is thine,
Then fearless flows my praise and free. Farewell! these songs I send to thee,
Like Tyrian wares o'er the foaming brine."
So also Hiero is not directly warned to abandon his schemes of aggression against Thero, but he is gently reminded that thus far his reign has brought to his people the blessings of peace—blessings which extend also to his neighbours the Italian Locrians:—
"Deinomenes' son, of thee
Sings at her door each Locrian maid, and looks abroad no more afraid,
From horrors of war by thy power set free!"
Pindar does not expressly urge Hiero to contrast the blessings of this peaceful present with the gloomy future which he is preparing for himself by war with Thero. He does not say ia so many words, "Look on this picture and on that." But his moral is perfectly clear, and Hiero could hardly fail to draw it for himself.
With all his tact Pindar is no mere courtier, prepared to ignore his patron's faults. He might easily have avoided the dangerous topic altogether. That he did not do so, proves both that he really cared for Hiero—or why should he have sought to reform him?—and that he honestly believed in the intrinsic goodness of his patron—or how could he hope that his admonitions would take effect? But it is not surprising that the poet's caution should have exposed him in some quarters to the charge of servility; or that his mingling of open praise and covert censure should have puzzled later readers, and led them to form strangely different estimates of Hiero's character: some describing him as the ideal king—brave, generous, trustful, and affectionate; while to others he appears as a vulgar tyrant—mean, grasping, and treacherous. A right understanding of Pindar's language presents us with another and probably a truer view. Hiero had great qualities and great faults; his position was one of great advantages, but also of great temptations: he was necessarily exposed to the machinations of evil counsellors, but his ears were not closed to the admonitions of honest friends. He was not an Alfred, but neither was he a Tiberius or a Caligula.
The moral lessons of the Second Pythian reappear to some extent in the Third and First Odes of the same group, also addressed to Hiero. In each we find the same mingling of praises and warnings,—warnings against ambition, avarice, rashness, seductions of evil counsellors, and the like. But, unlike the Second Pythian, neither the first nor the third is mainly occupied with these topics. In the third we find a prominent place assigned to the myth of Asclepius (Æsculapius), the legendary inventor of medicine. And, though certain points in the narrative seem introduced with a didactic purpose—hinting at the evil consequences of presumption, avarice, and trust in seductive advisers—this is not the immediate and obvious occasion of the story. Hiero was suffering from a painful and dangerous illness, and apparently had invited the poet to visit him. This leads Pindar to express a wish that he could call back from their graves the old masters of Greek leechcraft, to furnish his friend with the relief which he seeks in vain from the degenerate practitioners of his own day. "Could I but reawaken Asclepius, or his teacher Chiron," says the poet, "how gladly would I cross the seas to Hiero, and bring him Health as well as Songs!"
"Oh, if still within his grot
Dwelt Chiron sage, and this my lay
Had spells to bind his soul, him had I won
E'en now to send such healer to the good,
(Of Phœbus or his sire,[5] some true-born son!)
My bark should cleave the Ionian foam, and seek the hospitable home
Of Ætna's chief, by Arethusa's flood."
And in this connection Pindar relates the whole story of Asclepius, the son of Phœbus, miraculously rescued from the flames of his mother's funeral pyre, trained—like Jason and Achilles and many another youthful hero—in the hospitable cave of Chiron, appearing afterwards as the most skilled physician of his day, healing the sick, and even at last raising the dead,—an interference with the prerogative of Zeus which was punished by the instant destruction of both the Healer and his patient.
From this story Pindar passes to moral and philosophical reflections, adapted to the circumstances of his patron, and illustrated by appropriate myths. He consoles Hiero for his sufferings by reminding him that not even the old heroic kings, Peleus and Cadmus, "happiest of mortals," were wholly blest. He recalls the misfortunes of Cadmus's daughters, and the early death of Peleus's only son, Achilles. And the Ode closes with another reference to mythology, the immortal fame of Nestor and Sarpedon, which Hiero may rival if he imitates their virtues:—
"But few there are such bliss may lightly gain."
The opening verses of the First Pythian have already been quoted at the end of the first chapter. They contain that "Invocation of the Lyre" which is imitated by our own poet Gray, in his well-known "Ode on the Progress of Poesy." The mythological element in this Ode is slight. There is a brief allusion to the lame hero Philoctetes, whose assistance was needed to enable the Greeks of old to capture Troy. Hiero, physically infirm, yet a valiant and successful general, is compared to this fabled champion. And, complimenting Hiero on the constitution which he has established in his new city Ætna, "true to the good old Dorian type," Pindar pauses for a moment to dwell on the legendary migration of the Dorians from Northern Greece to Amyclæ in Laconia.
But the chief purpose of the Ode is to celebrate the military exploits of Hiero and his family, and especially their victories at Himera and Cumæ, which had crushed for the time the two most powerful foes of the Greeks in Sicily, the Phœnicians of Carthage and the Tyrrhenians of Etruria. Thus Pindar describes the battle, and prays that its effects may be lasting:—
"Oh, grant that in peace the mingled host,
Phœnician and Tuscan, henceforth may dwell, late vanquished on Cumæ's coast!
Mourn they at home their navies brought by Syracusa's king to nought,
Who, headlong from the swift ship's side, their warriors hurled beneath the tide,
And rescued Hellas from serfdom sore.
For Salamis be Athens famed;
Nor less brave Sparta's feats proclaimed,
That laid beneath Cithæron low
The archer-Medians! But, by Himera's shore,
Guerdon we with praise the might of Hiero's house, that crushed the foe!"
The Pirst Nemean is divided pretty equally between two themes, the virtues of Chromius (viceroy, as has been said, of Hiero in Ætna) and the myth of the infant Heracles. Allusion has been made in a previous chapter to the apparently gratuitous introduction of this legend; but a Nemean victory would naturally remind the poet of Heracles the slayer of the Nemean lion, and possibly the two snakes strangled by the infant hero may have been intended by Pindar to typify the combination of fierce barbarian foes over which the nascent Syracucan dynasty had triumphed so magnificently at Himera. Or he may have intended a compliment to the new civilisation which Chromius had established at Ætna, victorious over the deadly antagonisms of foreign war and internal disorder. The myth is told with admirable force and vividness, but is too long to quote entire. The following passage from it must suffice. The snakes have just entered the chamber—
"But as they came, the babe unterrified
Lifted his little head, and his first battle tried.
With either hand one horrid throat he grasped
Beneath those jaws of terror gaping wide.
Fast in that knot the monsters gasped,
Loosed their long spires, and drooped their head, and died.
Pierced by a pang of sudden fear,
Hurried the matrons near,
Who their kind vigil kept
Attentive where the mother slept.
And forth the mother rushed, her feet all bare,
E'en as she lay, in hope those monstrous beasts to scare.
At the wild cry the Thebans thronged amain
In brazen armour fain:
Amphitryon came in speed
Brandishing high his naked blade."—(S.)
Could anything be more graphic, or more true, than that picture of the mother rushing in "with feet all bare"? The trusty retainers stay to arm themselves; even Amphitryon—the putative father of the babe—lingers at least to seize a sword. But the mother can wait for nothing. "E'en as she lay," she rushes in, and outstrips all other succour.
The so-called Ninth Nemean really commemorates a victory won at Sicyon, and its mythical contents are drawn from the ancient local legends of that city, and of the Argive leader Adrastus, who had married a Sicyonian princess. For the rest, the Ode contains a passing allusion to new troubles brewing against Sicily from its dangerous neighbour Carthage, and a magnificent panegyric on the military exploits of Chromius, whose valiant youth, says the poet, has surely entitled him to hope for a peaceful and honoured old age. The close of the poem presents us with one of Pindar's ingenious and striking combinations of fact and fancy. The wine of song must flow for Chromius. And what bowl so fit to hold it as the silver goblets which Chromius has brought from Sicyon—the prize of his recent victory? Thus boldly and dexterously does Pindar's fancy glide from the concrete to the ideal world—from objects of sense like the visible and tangible race-cups, to objects of imagination like the immaterial wine of song.
We come now to the three Odes addressed to members of the royal house of Agrigentum. Thero, to whom the Second Olympian is addressed, was evidently a loved and honoured patron of the poet. But in Pindar's portraiture of him we miss those graphic touches which make the personality of Hiero stand out so clearly in the imagination of Pindar's readers. The unmixed encomium which Pindar lavishes on the king of Acragas leaves us with but a vague idea of his real character, or of the poet's conception of it. Yet this encomium is very fine of its kind. The valour, the wisdom, and the kindness of Thero are portrayed in brilliant colours, though the outline be somewhat vague and sketchy. The gem of the whole poem, however, is undoubtedly its description of the life after death—
"How swiftest vengeance waits the guilty dead;
And for the sins men sin in realms of day,
'Neath earth a stern judge speaks the sentence dread
Of fate's resistless sway.
But, by day alike and night,
Upon the righteous rises ever light;
They dwell in a life unvexed of toil, nor need to task the weary soil,
Nor waters of the main,
For scant subsistence. Tearless days they gain,
With those Heaven-honoured ones in Truth that joy;
While sinners cower 'neath weight of dire annoy.
Happiest they that thrice endure
Through life and death, and still from sin are pure.
For such Zeus leads to Cronus' tower, where round about the island bower
Of blessed spirits strays
Breath of sea airs, and golden flow'rets blaze,
Some on fair trees, some of the waters bred:
Wherewith themselves they garland hands and head."
The Ode ends with a fine outburst of admiration and gratitude:—
"Than Thero's, in a hundred years, no land
Shall rear you kinder heart nor freer hand!
Though envy strive his glories to deface
(No generous foe, but nursed in natures base,
That loves to talk the good man's praise away):
Yet, as the sand still foils the reckoner's count,
Such are the joys we owe him. Who shall say
How boundless their amount?"
The Sixth Pythian and the Second Isthmian both commemorate victories of Thero's brother Xenocrates. They are addressed, however, not to the victor himself, but to his son Thrasybulus. Pindar dwells warmly on the generous hospitality and kindliness of both father and son, and on the strong affection—honourable to both—which existed between them. In the race which forms the theme of the Sixth Pythian, Thrasybulus seems to have acted as charioteer to his father—and this incident suggests to Pindar the legend of another son who had rendered good service to his father Antilochus, son of the aged Nestor. In a skirmish under the walls of Troy, Nestor found himself in imminent danger; the terrible Memnon's spear was already uplifted to slay him, and in dismay he called to his son for aid—
"Nor wasted on the earth his words he flung:
Firm the hero stood,
And for his father gave his blood.
Thus in his day to all the young
Seemed that achiever of a deed of might
Pattern most fair of filial bravery."
"All of this is now gone by," adds the poet; but of the men of our own time Thrasybulus comes nearest to the old type of loyal sonship. And in other things, too, he is a worthy nephew of Thero—generous, pure, modest, cultured, and valiant—
"Kind of heart, and such a friend
To all that share in his feasts, as ne'er
So sweet was fretwork of the bee!"
The Second Isthmian was written seemingly after the death of Xenocrates. The dynasty of Thero had fallen, but Thrasybulus still lived in Acragas. His personal virtues, or the favour of Hiero, sufficed to maintain him unmolested amid the citizens who had overthrown his kinsman's sovereignty, hut not, apparently, to silence the resentful murmurs of some against the memory of the fallen house. Pindar hints that to some of these the praise of Xenocrates's exploits may prove unwelcome. Yet he urges Thrasybulus not to shrink from praising them. And, if we may trust the poet's description, Xenocrates was a father of whom a son might well be proud. He is depicted as the very mirror of Grecian chivalry, a genial gracious prince, his innate goodness expressing itself in his very aspect, keeping up the racing traditions of his family on principle, as a duty demanded of him by his position.
And as for his hospitality, it passed all bounds,—ranged (says Pindar) "from Phasis to Nile," or, as we might say, "from China to Peru:"—
"Courteous his eye and bland. He loved to feed,
As Grecians use, the gallant steed;
Each holy sacrifice and feast
He fed, a liberal guest:
And oh! his hospitable mind
Spread its full canvas to the wind,
Wide as to Phasis' distant shore the while,
Or furthest Nile."—(S.)