The Æginetans were remarkable athletes as well as fighters, and Pindar boasted that he held up a mirror to their noble deeds, and wrought for them a necklace of the Muses, “with white ivory and gold inlaid and coral of the lily flower gathered ’neath the ocean dew.” The young Pytheas, indeed, who won the pancratium at Nemea, was celebrated by both Pindar and Bacchylides, and in the ode of the latter poet there lurks the memory of some spring visit to Ægina when the young flowers and reeds were made into garlands, and bare-footed girls bounded like young fawns toward the flowery hills. Pindar, in the eleven extant odes which he wrote for Æginetan youths, mingled a “fitting draught as meed for their toil upon the highway clear of god-inspired deeds.” His willingness to use his best gifts in their behalf he explained by the ancient friendship between the island and his native city, typified by the sisterhood of the nymphs Thebe and Ægina, both beloved by Zeus. And although he praised the athletic spirit of the Æginetans and their justice, their defence of strangers, and the deliverance wrought by them at Salamis “when Zeus was showering destruction far and wide and death came thick as hail upon unnumbered men,” his most frequent theme was the glory of their legendary heroes. The nymph Ægina had borne Æacus, who was so just a king that at his death the gods made him a judge in Hades. His sons were Peleus and Telamon, their sons were Achilles and Ajax and Teucer. “Beyond the sources of the Nile and through the Hyperboreans they pass, nor is there any city so barbarian or confused in speech that it knoweth not the hero Peleus and his fame nor that of Ajax, son of Telamon, whom on his ships Alcmena’s son led forth to Troy.” Lords of wide adventure, they drifted away from Ægina’s shores. Teucer, son of Telamon, ruled in Cyprus, a new land, and Ajax held the Salamis of his father. Peleus ruled in Thessalian Pthia. In the Euxine Sea Achilles won a “shining isle,” and his son was prince in “Epirus, famed afar, where, from Dodona on, the cattle-pasturing headlands, jutting high, lie out against the Ionian Sea.” But at the invocation of Pindar they gather once more in their ancient home. Nor was the significance of human greatness absent from Pindar’s mind:— “Within a little space the joys of man spring up; so too they fall again to earth when shaken by an adverse doom. We creatures of a day! What’s man? What is he not?—a shadow’s dream! But when there comes a glory sent of God there rests on men a bright light and an age serene.” Thus to a youth of Ægina who was lifted on the wings of hope and valour the poet gave a warning and a larger hope. CHAPTER X MEGARA AND CORINTH—THE GULF OF CORINTH