For Pindar, indeed, it was necessary that every song should rise above the sordid, either in belief or practice. He was at once a supreme artist and a herald of the ideal. He even expurgates canonical mythology to infuse into his odes some deeper, nobler lesson suggested by the external and physical victory. And this, although several of his odes were addressed to rich tyrants like Hieron of Syracuse, at whose court were welcomed and honoured Æschylus, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides and many more. “He was to them in some measure what Augustus was to Virgil and Horace, what Lorenzo de’ Medici was to the members of the Florentine Academy.”[39] Pindar honestly regarded him as the patron of letters and as a bulwark against the barbarians. He had fought under Gelon against the Carthaginians, and, soon after the battles of Himera and Salamis, the Etruscans, who were also threatening Greek supremacy, were, in 474 B. C., defeated by him. Early in the nineteenth century, from a partial excavation at Olympia, a bronze helmet of Etruscan make found its way to the British Museum. On it is the inscription: “Hieron, son of Deinomenes, and the Syracusans (dedicated) to Zeus these Tyrrhene spoils from Cumæ.” It tantalizes with the sequence of historic associations. From lips within this helmet came words of war in the dead Etruscan tongue that still baffles linguistic classification; on it were inscribed Greek words in the dialect of the proud Greek colonists in Sicily; mingled Greek dialects greeted it when dedicated in the sacred centre of the motherland; and now it is again held as spoils by another and mightier island folk. Footnote 39: Compare Jebb’s _Bacchylides_, p. 200. Pindar could not prophesy the fatal conflict between the tyrants of the west and the greedy imperialism of Athenian demagogues. He could not peer into the stone quarries at Syracuse and see the legatees of Salamis scorched under the lidless eye of a Sicilian sun. He could not foresee a Macedonian ruling over Hellas nor forecast the Greek world under Roman sway. He could not have understood how even Plato, with the additional perspective of another half century, crowded with disturbing shifts of value both in literature and government, would seek relief from the spectre of tyranny not in democracy but by converting the baser metal of the despot into the pure gold of the philosophic King. Yet Pindar is not without his misgivings. In words none too vague he warns the ruler, whose gold called forth his songs, of the dangers inherent in power. In the first Olympian he tells Hieron:— “A man erreth if he thinketh that in doing aught he shall escape God’s eyes.... Man’s greatness is of many kinds; the highest is to be achieved by Kings. Crane not thy neck for more. And be it thine to walk life’s path with lofty tread.”