IV.
FOR ARKESILAS OF KYRENE,
WINNER IN THE CHARIOT-RACE.
Pindar has made this victory of Arkesilas, King of the Hellenic colony of Kyrene in Africa, an occasion for telling the story of Jason's expedition with the Argonauts. The ostensible reason for introducing the story is that Kyrene had been colonised from the island of Thera by the descendants of the Argonaut Enphemos, according to the prophecy of Medea related at the beginning of the ode. But Pindar had another reason. He wished to suggest an analogy between the relation of the Iolchian[errata 1] king Pelias to Jason and the relation of Arkesilas to his exiled kinsman Demophilos. Demophilos had been staying at Thebes, where Pindar wrote this ode, to be afterwards recited at Kyrene. It was written B.C. 466, when Pindar was fifty-six years of age, and is unsurpassed in his extant works, or indeed by anything in all extant poetry.
This day O Muse must thou tarry in a friend's house, the house of the king of Kyrene of goodly horses, that with Arkesilas at his triumph thou mayst swell the favourable gale of song, the due of Leto's children, and of Pytho. For at Pytho of old she who sitteth beside the eagles of Zeus—nor was Apollo absent then—the priestess, spake this oracle, that Battos should found a power in fruitful Libya, that straightway departing from the holy isle he might lay the foundations of a city of goodly chariots upon a white breast of the swelling earth, and might fulfil in the seventeenth generation the word of Medea spoken at Thera, which of old the passionate child of Aietes, queen of Colchians, breathed from immortal lips.
