Pythian

Pindar

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

  1. And I hope that, while the Ephyreans pour forth my sweet voice beside the Peneius, with my songs I will make Hippocleas even more admired for his garlands by boys his age and by his elders, and I will make the girls think of him. For
  2. people«s minds are tickled by various desires;
  3. but whatever each man strives for, let him hold on to it eagerly if he gets it, the concern that is close at hand. It is impossible to foresee what will happen a year from now. I trust in the gentle friendship of Thorax; he made busy efforts for my sake,
  4. and yoked this four-horse chariot of the Pierian Muses, a friend for a friend, going gladly arm in arm.
  5. Gold shows its nature when it is tried by the touchstone, and so does a right-thinking mind. We shall further praise his noble brothers, because
  6. they exalt and strengthen the traditional laws of the Thessaliaaans; the good piloting of states, handed from father to son, rests in the hands of noble men.
  1. [*](The scholia (Inscr. a and b) give both dates. ) Daughters of Cadmus, Semele dwelling among the Olympians and Ino Leucothea, sharing the chamber of the Nereid sea-nymphs: come, with the mother of Heracles, greatest in birth, to the presence of Melia; come to the sanctuary of golden tripods,
  2. the treasure-house which Loxias honored above all
  3. and named the Ismenion, true seat of prophecy. Come, children of Harmonia, where even now he calls the native host of heroines to assemble, so that you may loudly sing of holy Themis and Pytho and the just
  4. navel of the earth, at the edge of evening,
  5. in honor of seven-gated Thebes and the contest at Cirrha, in which Thrasydaeus caused his ancestral hearth to be remembered by flinging over it a third wreath
  6. as a victor in the rich fields of Pylades, the friend of Laconian Orestes,
  7. who indeed, when his father was murdered, was taken by his nurse Arsinoe from the strong hands and bitter deceit of Clytaemnestra, when she sent the Dardanian daughter of Priam,