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 Euphemos, 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
Iolkian 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 of this kind in
all 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,