the rapidity with which the details are suggested only makes the impression more distinct. And sometimes the effect of a particular scene is heightened by contrast with the hurry of surrounding passages, as, in the Sixth Olympian, the beautiful details in the picture of the deserted babe Iamus are set off by the rapid hints of the confusion in the palace, the hurried departure of Æpytus for the Delphian oracle, and the scene of triumph and congratulation at his return. Further, in the moral and didactic portions of his Odes, Pindar's power of expressing ideas rapidly appears in the form of a sententious terseness, well calculated to arrest the attention and to impress the imagination of his readers. Thoughts which are fine in themselves appear yet more imposing when embodied in language concise and pregnant as the utterances of an oracle. And even where his thought is trivial, it is often expressed with a felicitous point and brevity that present truisms as epigrams, and fallacies as at worst ingenious paradoxes.
The accounts of particular Odes in our previous chapters will, it is to be hoped, have convinced the reader that mere command of style is not the only merit of our author's poetry. His conception of the character of Jason[1] is surely at once original and noble, and it is developed through a succession of scenes with a consistency and dexterity which imply no small dramatic talent. Pindar has been charged with exhibiting in his poetry a certain coldness, and want of human tenderness,—not indeed peculiar to
- ↑ In the Fourth Pythian Ode: see chap. ix.
