Olympian

Pindar

Pindar. Arnson Svarlien, Diane, translator. Created for the Perseus Project, 1990.

  1. Without toil only a few have attained joy, a light of life above all labors. The laws of Zeus urge me to sing of that extraordinary contest-place which Heracles founded by the ancient tomb of Pelops
  2. with its six altars, after he killed Cteatus, the flawless son of Poseidon
  3. and Eurytus too, with a will to exact from the unwilling Augeas, strong and violent, the wages for his menial labor.
  4. Heracles lay in wait in the thicket below Cleonae, and in his turn overcame those men by the roadside; for once before those arrogant Moliones had destroyed his Tirynthian army, when it was encamped in the valley of Elis,
  5. And indeed it was not much later before the man who betrayed his friend,
  6. the king of the Epeians, saw his land with all its possessions, his own city, sink into a deep channel of destruction beneath unyielding fire and blows of iron. A fight with a stronger man
  7. is impossible to push away. So even he, by his own senselessness, last of all found himself captured and did not escape sheer destruction.
  8. But the brave son of Zeus gathered the entire army and all the spoils together in Pisa
  9. and measured out a sacred precinct for his supreme father. He enclosed the Altis all around and marked it off in the open, and he made the encircling area a resting-place for feasting, honoring the stream of the Alpheus
  10. along with the twelve ruling gods.
  11. And he called it the Hill of Cronus; it had been nameless before, while Oenomaus was king, and it was covered with wet snow. But in this rite of first birth the Fates stood close by, and the one who alone puts genuine truth to the test,
  12. Time. Time moved forward and told the clear and precise story, how Heracles divided the gifts of war and sacrificed the finest of them, and how he established the four years’ festival with the first Olympic games and its victories.
  13. Who won the first garland, with the skill of his hands or feet or chariot, setting the boast of victory in his mind and achieving it with his deeds?