Pausanias tells of a Corinthian race-horse, Aura (“Breeze”), perhaps one of the famous “Koppa”[[38]] breed, sired by Pegasus. The jockey was thrown at the beginning of the race, but the mare continued without breaking form, rounded the turning stake, quickened her pace at the sound of the trumpet, reached the umpires first, knew that she had won, and stopped. The owner of the riderless horse was proclaimed victor.
It would be very unsafe to assert that the eager Greeks, if called back to our own age of ingenious mechanisms, would turn uninterested from the vicarious competition by motor-cars, or feel nothing but disgust at human forms crooked into the semblance of brutes over a flying bicycle, but it is safe to emphasize that all their contests, whether exhibiting the development of the perfect human body or the beauty of the horse, ministered to that sure sense of form and proportion which they demanded and obtained from poet, painter, and musician, sculptor, architect, and athlete. But horse and chariot-racing involved certain special temptations. As time went on, the “anything to win” spirit was sure, now and then, to assert itself. The legend of the lynch-pin withdrawn from the chariot of Œnomaus by the bribery of Pelops must have called for strenuous casuistry from the priests of Zeus when it was necessary to punish offenders for shady practices towards rivals. Pindar magnificently ignores the thought of treachery. With him it is a god that—
“glorified him with the gift of golden chariot and winged untiring steeds: mighty Œnomaus he overtook and won the maiden for his bride.”
Although in later times the peripatetic professional developed and could claim as precedent the victories repeatedly won at various centres by the athletes of old, yet, at least for their own times, Pindar and Bacchylides were justified in assuming, alike for their Sicilian princes or for their boyish winners in the foot-race, the genuine amateur spirit of athletic rivalry. In the fourth century B. C. a Cretan, victor in the long race, was bribed to transfer his citizenship to Ephesus. The Olympian athlete had not then become, like the modern base-ball pitcher, a legitimate commodity of interstate commerce, and the Cretans with justifiable indignation pronounced the sentence of perpetual exile against Sotades the offender.
For Pindar, indeed, it was necessary that every song should rise above the sordid, either in belief or practice. He was at once a supreme artist and a herald of the ideal. He even expurgates canonical mythology to infuse into his odes some deeper, nobler lesson suggested by the external and physical victory. And this, although several of his odes were addressed to rich tyrants like Hieron of Syracuse, at whose court were welcomed and honoured Æschylus, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides and many more. “He was to them in some measure what Augustus was to Virgil and Horace, what Lorenzo de’ Medici was to the members of the Florentine Academy.”[[39]] Pindar honestly regarded him as the patron of letters and as a bulwark against the barbarians. He had fought under Gelon against the Carthaginians, and, soon after the battles of Himera and Salamis, the Etruscans, who were also threatening Greek supremacy, were, in 474 B. C., defeated by him. Early in the nineteenth century, from a partial excavation at Olympia, a bronze helmet of Etruscan make found its way to the British Museum. On it is the inscription: “Hieron, son of Deinomenes, and the Syracusans (dedicated) to Zeus these Tyrrhene spoils from Cumæ.” It tantalizes with the sequence of historic associations. From lips within this helmet came words of war in the dead Etruscan tongue that still baffles linguistic classification; on it were inscribed Greek words in the dialect of the proud Greek colonists in Sicily; mingled Greek dialects greeted it when dedicated in the sacred centre of the motherland; and now it is again held as spoils by another and mightier island folk.
Pindar could not prophesy the fatal conflict between the tyrants of the west and the greedy imperialism of Athenian demagogues. He could not peer into the stone quarries at Syracuse and see the legatees of Salamis scorched under the lidless eye of a Sicilian sun. He could not foresee a Macedonian ruling over Hellas nor forecast the Greek world under Roman sway. He could not have understood how even Plato, with the additional perspective of another half century, crowded with disturbing shifts of value both in literature and government, would seek relief from the spectre of tyranny not in democracy but by converting the baser metal of the despot into the pure gold of the philosophic King. Yet Pindar is not without his misgivings. In words none too vague he warns the ruler, whose gold called forth his songs, of the dangers inherent in power. In the first Olympian he tells Hieron:—
“A man erreth if he thinketh that in doing aught he shall escape God’s eyes.... Man’s greatness is of many kinds; the highest is to be achieved by Kings. Crane not thy neck for more. And be it thine to walk life’s path with lofty tread.”
With better right and greater force Æschylus, himself warrior of Marathon and Salamis, in the “Agamemnon” covertly warns his Athenian contemporaries, then engaged in imperial schemes of expansion in Egypt and elsewhere, against the haughty spirit that goeth before a fall. His words easily connect themselves with this Pindaric ode because the return of the Greek host from Troy brings out on Clytemnestra’s lips the metaphor drawn from the double racecourse—the δίαυλος. Ilium is but the turning-post at the farther end; Argos is both the starting-point and the goal; the stadium is the Ægean sea:—
“But beware lest some desire
May fall upon our men, succumbing to their greed,