There is, however, in this athletic art something more than mere beauty or mere strength. The outward harmony is but the expression of that harmonious development of mind and body which it was the aim of Greek education to produce by means of music and gymnastic. For the interpretation of this spirit we can turn to the living word—a surer guide than merely subjective impressions. Athletic poetry arose like athletic sculpture in the sixth century, but while the athletic ideal continued to influence Greek art during the whole of its history, the hymn of victory, like the athletic painting on the vase, disappears abruptly before the Peloponnesian wars. The earliest writer of the epinikion, Simonides of Ceos, was born in the year 556 B.C.; his nephew Bacchylides, born at Iulis in the same island, lived till the year 428 B.C.[113] His great Theban rival, Pindar, born a few years earlier, had died in 443 B.C. With Pindar and Bacchylides the epinikion almost ceased to exist. We have indeed a fragment of a hymn written some years later by Euripides to celebrate the triumphs of Alcibiades in the chariot-race at Olympia. But this is a mere accident, and it is, we may mark, in honour not of an athletic event but of a chariot-race. Euripides, we shall see, was little inclined to hymn the athletes of his day. The last of Pindar’s Odes, the 8th PYTHIAN, was written in honour of a victory in wrestling won by Aristomenes of Aegina in 446 B.C., and the latest odes of Bacchylides which we can date are six years earlier. The agreement of these dates with the evidence of the vase paintings can hardly be an accidental coincidence. Particularly noticeable are the number and importance of those odes which belong to the years immediately following the Persian wars. The writer of epinikia, like the sculptor of athletic statues, was by the very nature of his art Panhellenic. His muse, as Pindar tells us, was a hireling. He wrote for those who could pay him best, for the wealthy nobles of Thessaly or Aegina, or the princes of Sicily. Neither in Ceos nor in Thebes could a poet find sufficient scope for his genius. The little island of Ceos, famed for its athletes and its music, lay somewhat outside the main currents of Greek life. Thebes had fallen from her legendary greatness, and played but an inglorious part in the Persian wars. Hence, though the poets turned with special tenderness and pride to sing of the victors of their native cities, they spent much of their lives at the courts of powerful patrons, and found their highest inspiration in that burst of Panhellenic feeling that the Persian wars produced, and which for the moment united in the service of Hellas tyrant and oligarch and people. If Theban Pindar could not, like Simonides, sing of those who fell at Thermopylae or Salamis, his patriotism found vent in no less than six odes in honour of the victors in the great national celebration at Olympia in 476 B.C.