Pythian

Pindar

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

  1. and yoked this four-horse chariot of the Pierian Muses, a friend for a friend, going gladly arm in arm.
  2. 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
  3. 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,
  8. Cassandra, together with the soul of Agamemnon, to the shadowy bank of Acheron with her gray blade of bronze,
  9. the pitiless woman. Was it Iphigeneia, slaughtered at the Euripus far from her fatherland, that provoked her to raise the heavy hand of her anger? Or was she vanquished by another bed
  10. and led astray by their nightly sleeping together? This is the most hateful error for young brides, and is impossible to conceal
  11. because other people will talk. Citizens are apt to speak evil, for prosperity brings with it envy as great as itself.
  12. But the man who breathes close to the ground roars unseen. He himself died, the heroic son of Atreus, when at last he returned to famous Amyclae,
  13. and he caused the destruction of the prophetic girl, when he had robbed of their opulent treasures the houses of the Trojans, set on fire for Helen«s sake. And his young son went to the friend of the family, the old man
  14. Strophius, who dwelled at the foot of Parnassus. But at last, with the help of Ares, he killed his mother and laid Aegisthus low in blood.
  15. My friends, I was whirled off the track at a shifting fork in the road, although I had been traveling on a straight path before. Or did some wind throw me off course,
  16. like a skiff on the sea? Muse, it is your task, if you undertook to lend your voice for silver, to let it flit now this way, now that:
  17. now to the father, who was a Pythian victor, now to his son Thrasydaeus.