ABSTRACT
In the poetry of Augustan Rome it is possible to distinguish between passages in which the poet speaks of the immortality he will achieve for himself and those in which he speaks of the immortality he will confer upon others, but in the great public odes of Pindar, celebrating victors in the Panhellenic Games, these two themes are really inseparable, and indeed we sometimes seem to catch sight of the poet holding out what, as one might say in Miltonic language, seems his hat and insinuating, with decent obscurity and periphrasis, that the man who is wise as well as wealthy will not omit to pay a poet to immortalise him. These passages on the immortalising power of poetry are very frequent in Pindar's odes and often very splendid. 1 Here it must suffice to quote (in Sandy's translation) two representative examples. From the tenth Olympian (ll. 91–6):
Whensoever a man, who hath done noble deeds, descendeth to the abode of Hades, without the meed of song, he hath spent his strength and his breath in vain, and winneth but a little pleasure by his toil; whereas thou hast glory shed upon thee by the soft-tongued lyre and by the sweet flute, and thy fame waxeth widely by favour of the Pierid daughters of Zeus.
