The fact is, the character of the 'Odes of Victory' as a literary phenomenon has been very imperfectly apprehended. It is hard for us to figure to the imagination a form of art which partakes in nearly equal parts of the nature of a collect, a ballad, and an oratorio; or to enter into the mind of a poet who is partly also a priest, a librettist, and a ballet master; who, while celebrating the victory of (perhaps) a boy in a wrestling match, yet feels that he is not only doing an act of divine service and worship, but preaching the sacred truth of the unity of the Hellenes and their common descent from gods and heroes. The Odes of Pindar have their source in a religious feeling, almost as alien from ours as it is from that which sent the children through the fire to Moloch, or strewed with corpses the path of Juggernaut's car.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, March 30, 2014
Pindar's Victory Odes
Robert Yelverton Tyrrell (1844-1914), Essays on Greek Literature (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1909), p. 2: