After the age which gave birth to the great epics, an interval elapses before we again catch the distinct echoes of a popular voice. Our Homeric friend _Tis_ is silent. Or, rather, to be more exact, _Tis_ ceases to speak in his old character, as the nameless representative of the multitude, and begins to speak in a new quality. The individual mind now commences to express itself in forms of poetry which are essentially personal, interpreting the belief and feelings of the poet himself. _Tis_ emerges from the dim crowd, and appears as Tyrtaeus, summoning the Spartans, in stirring elegy, to hear _his_ counsels; or as Sappho, uttering _her_ passion in immortal lyrics; or as Pindar, weaving _his_ thoughts into those magnificent odes which glorify the heroes and the athletes of Greece. It is a capital distinction of classical Greek literature that, when its history is viewed as a whole, we do not find it falling into a series of artificial chapters, determined by imitation of models which were in fashion at this or that epoch. Greek literature is original, not derivative; we trace in it the course of a natural growth; we hear in it the spontaneous utterance of Greek life from generation to generation. The place of Pindar in this development has one aspect of peculiar interest. There is a sense in which he may be said to stand midway between Homeric epos and Athenian drama.[57] His poetical activity belongs to the years which immediately preceded and followed the invasions of Greece by the hosts of Persia. A great danger had drawn the members of the Hellenic family closer together; a signal deliverance had left them animated by the memory of deeds which seemed to attest the legends of Agamemnon and Achilles; warmed by a more vivid faith in those gods who had been present with them through the time of trial; comforted by a new stability of freedom; cheered by a sense of Hellenic energies which could expand securely from the Danube to the Nile, from the Euxine to the Atlantic; exalted in thought and fancy by the desire to embody their joy and hope in the most beautiful forms which language and music, marble, ivory, and gold could furnish for the honor of the gods, and for the delight of men who, through the heroes, claimed a divine descent. The Greek mind, stirred to its centre by the victorious efforts which had repelled the barbarian, could no longer be satisfied by epic narratives of the past. It longed to see the heroes moving; to hear them speaking; to throw back upon their world the vivifying light of contemporary reflection. In a word, the spirit of drama had descended upon Hellas; and already it breathes in Pindar, the poet of the games. Olympia, with its temples, its statues, and its living athletes, corresponded to the essence of Greek drama—action idealised by art and consecrated by religion. Pindar, the last of the great lyric poets, is the lyric exponent of an impulse which received mature expression from Aeschylus,