Pindar passed his time chiefly at Thebes, where his home was. But he also visited the different parts of Greece, frequently staying at Delphi, where the iron chair on which he sat and sang was long preserved; and also journeying to the houses of his patrons--Hiero of Syracuse, and presumably Theron of Agrigentum, and perhaps, too, Alexander of Macedon. Olympia must have often received him as a guest, as well as the island of Ægina, where he had many friends. Odes were sent by him to Cyrene, to Ceos, to Rhodes--on what tablets, we may wonder, adorned with what caligraphy from Pindar's stylus, in what casket worthy of the man who loved magnificence? The Rhodians inscribed his seventh Olympian--the most radiant panegyric of the sea-born isle of Helios--in letters of gold on the walls of their temple of the Lindian Athene. In the midst of his artistic labors, and while serving many patrons, Pindar, as we shall see, preserved his dignity and loftiness of moral character. Pindar is said to have died in the theatre at Argos, in the arms of Theoxenos, a youth whom he loved passionately, and whom he has praised in the most sublime strains for his beauty in a scolion, the fragment of which we possess.[105] Anacreon choked by a grape-stone; Sophocles breathing out his life together with the pathetic lamentations of Antigone; Æschylus killed on the sea-shore by the eagle whose flight he had watched; Empedocles committing his fiery but turbid spirit to the flames of Etna; Sappho drowning her sorrows in the surf of the Leucadian sea; Ibycus, the poet-errant, murdered by land-robbers; Euripides torn to pieces like his own Pentheus; Archilochus honored in his death by an oracle that cursed his battle-foe; Pindar, amid the plaudits of the theatre, sinking back into the arms of his Theoxenos and dying in a noontide blaze of glory--these are the appropriate and dramatic endings which the literary gossips among the Greeks, always inventively ingenious, ascribed to some of their chief poets. _Se non son veri, son ben trovati._ Some purely legendary details show the estimation in which Pindar was held by his countrymen. Multitudes of bees are said to have settled on his lips when he was an infant. Pan chose a hymn of his and sang it on the mountains, honoring a mortal poet with his divine voice. The Mother of the gods took up her dwelling at his door. Lastly, we have the famous story of the premonition of his death in dreams--a legend of peculiar significance, when we remember that Pindar, like Sir Thomas Browne, believed that "we are more than ourselves in our sleep," and wrote: All by happy fate attain The end that frees them from their pain; And the body yields to death, But the shape of vital breath Still in life continueth; It alone is heaven's conferring: Sleeps it when the limbs are stirring. But when they sleep, in many dreams it shows The coming consummation both of joys and woes.[106]