The Extant Odes of Pindar. Pindar

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664186393

Table of Contents

       INTRODUCTION.

       PREFATORY NOTE.

       OLYMPIAN ODES.

       II.

       III.

       IV.

       V.

       VI.

       VII.

       VIII.

       IX.

       X.

       XI.

       XII.

       XIII.

       XIV.

       THE PYTHIAN ODES.

       II.

       III.

       IV.

       V.

       VI.

       VII.

       VIII.

       IX.

       X.

       XI.

       XII.

       THE NEMEAN ODES.

       II.

       III.

       IV.

       V.

       VI.

       VII.

       VIII.

       IX.

       X.

       XI.

       THE ISTHMIAN ODES.

       II.

       III.

       IV.

       V.

       VI.

       VII.

       FRAGMENTS.

       FRAGMENT OF A DITHYRAMB,

       FRAGMENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

       Table of Contents

      Probably no poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar finds so few and so infrequent readers. The causes are not far to seek: in the first and most obvious place comes the great difficulty of his language, in the second the frequent obscurity of his thought, resulting mainly from his exceeding allusiveness and his abrupt transitions, and in the third place that amount of monotony which must of necessity attach to a series of poems provided for a succession of similar occasions.

      It is as an attempt towards obviating the first of these hindrances to the study of Pindar, the difficulty of his language, that this translation is of course especially intended. To whom and in what cases are translations of poets useful? To a perfect scholar in the original tongue they are superfluous, to one wholly ignorant of it they are apt to be (unless here and there to a Keats) meaningless, flat, and puzzling. There remains the third class of those who have a certain amount of knowledge of a language, but not enough to enable them to read unassisted its more difficult books without