idea probably included as much of fiction as of fact. Some elements in it were derived, no doubt, from genuine traditions, handed down from father to son in the families of Pindar and his patrons. But others were due to faulty inferences from these traditions, or to misinterpretations of the poet's own language about himself, or to the existence among the Greeks of a certain stock of floating legends with a continual tendency to reproduce themselves in connection with the name of any illustrious poet—stories of juvenile triumphs, defeated rivals, royal compliments, besides more obviously mythical tales of divine apparitions, and of mysterious influences exerted by poets over the brute creation. A mass of such legend seems to have crystallised round Pindar's name almost m his lifetime, certamly before Chamæleon attempted to write his memoir. And considering that Chamæleon's purpose was probably rather literary than strictly historical, and that his 'Book on Pindar' was only one volume of a series, it is unlikely that in this case he took any special pains to sift his evidence, and distinguish in it the actual from the mythical. As a matter of fact, the one statement about Pindar's life, which was unquestionably derived by later writers from Chamæleon's work, is one of the most unmistakable myths in the whole story.
Chamæleon's book, however, seems to have long held its ground as the standard biography of Pindar. It supplied, no doubt, a starting-point for the researches of the Alexandrian librarian, Aristophanes (in the third century B.C.), to whom we owe our present arrangement
