With Pindar it is different. He is a prophet with a theory of life which he applies to everything of which he sings, to the stories of gods and heroes, or to the deeds of men. He has, too, a high conception of the poet’s office, which is to give to all excellence that immortal fame which should be the chief incentive to all noble deeds. It has been said that to be an athlete and the father of athletes is for Pindar the highest reach of human ambition. The criticism is unfair for two reasons. In the first place, it takes account only of a portion of Pindar’s work. He is said to have written poems of ten different classes, most of them connected with the worship of the gods. Of nine of these classes we possess but a few fragments; only the epinikia have survived. In the epinikia the poet’s theme is necessarily the praise of winners at the games, in other words the praise of youth, and early manhood. But Pindar himself recognizes clearly that every age has its own excellence. The virtues of the old are good counsel and prudence, those of youth are courage and endurance. “By trial is the issue manifest,”[116] and the virtues of youth are proved in battle,[117] or in the peaceful contests of the games, which are, as we have seen, the training of the citizen for the sterner contests of war. Secondly, the word “athlete” is ambiguous. It suggests too much the professional athlete of a later age, the man who, from selfish and mercenary motives, devoted his whole life to athletics and who, as Euripides tells us, was after his prime “useless as a worn-out coat.” But the well-born youths and princes for whom Pindar sang were actuated by no mercenary motives, but by that pure love of physical effort and of competition which is natural to all healthy youth. “The shepherd, and the ploughman, the fowler, and he whom the sea feedeth, strive but to keep fierce famine from their bellies; but whoso in the games or in war hath won delightful fame, receiveth the highest of rewards in fair words of citizens and of strangers.”[118] What then are the qualities of Pindar’s athlete? They are summed up in that most typical of all his athletic odes, the 11th _Olympian_, in honour of Agesidamus of Epizephyrian Locri, the winner of the boys’ boxing match in the great Ol. 76. “If one be born with excellent gifts, then may another who sharpeneth his natural edge, speed him, God helping, to an exceeding weight of glory. Without toil there have triumphed a very few.”