But let us now turn to the poets of the fifth century, above all to Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, of whose works we have considerable portions. These were poets whose position and genius made them the truest witnesses to the highest thoughts of Greece, and especially of Athens in that glorious period of her supremacy from the time of the Persian Wars through the Periclean age. The poetry of Pindar and of the tragedians was by its very nature connected with the service of the gods. The former wrote his odes to the victors who had won renown at the great national festivals of Zeus, Apollo, and Poseidon, or composed his hymns and paeans in honor of the divinities. The tragedians produced their plays for performance at the great festival of Dionysus. And yet we must be cautious here, as everywhere, since we are not always justified in attributing to the poet the sentiments which he puts into the mouths of his speakers. The tragedian’s purpose was first of all artistic. While it is true that his own beliefs inevitably colored and tempered his work, still he never became a preacher. He dealt with traditional material, which he might modify somewhat, but in large measure his themes were determined for him. Yet there are many passages both in choral songs and in single speeches which certainly reflect the poet’s own thought or his interpretation of the views held by his audience. The very strength of personality which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides possessed made it impossible that they should not voice their own conceptions, and that too without violence to their poetic purpose. Pindar’s work lay in different fields, but he no less than the tragedians helped to interpret and mould the moral and religious sentiments of his audience. Pindar was born about 522 B.C. of a noble family near Thebes in Boeotia; but he belonged to all Greece. He wrote in the first half of the fifth century when the influence of the preceding century was still strong upon men’s minds, and he also shared the great stimulus which their country’s victory over the Persians imparted to the Greeks. Of his personal devotion to the gods we have abundant evidence. He spent a part of his fortune in dedications at Thebes. There in the second century of our era the traveller Pausanias saw three statues which the poet had set up, one in honor of Apollo, another to Hermes, and a third, by the famous sculptor Calamis, which stood in the shrine of Zeus Ammon. To the Asiatic Cybele and to the new Arcadian Pan Pindar erected a shrine before his own door; there, as he himself tells us, the Theban maidens came by night and sang their hymns.[112]