Pindar: Second Olympian Ode (c. early 5th century B.C.E.)
Born in Boetoia, Pindar (c.522-443) has been see as one of the most influential of all ancient Greek lyrical poets. Of the number of poems he composed, the only complete versions are of the Olympian odes.
Antistrophe III
Alone in famed Olympiads sand
The victor’s chaplet Theron wore;
But with him on the Isthmian strand,
On sweet Castalia’s shore,
The verdant crowns, the proud reward
Of victory his brother shared,
Copartner in immortal praise,
As warmed with equal zeal
The light-foot courser’s generous breed to raise,
And whirl around the goal the fervid wheel.
The painful strife Olympia’s wreath repays:
But wealth with nobler virtue joined
The means and fair occasions must procure;
In glory’s chase must aid the mind,
Expense and toil and danger to endure;
With mingling rays they feed each other’s flame,
And shine the brightest lamp in all the sphere of fame.
Epode III
The happy mortal, who these treasures shares,
Well knows what fate attends his generous cares;
Knows, that beyond the verge of life and light,
In the sad regions of infernal night,
The fierce, impracticable, churlish mind
Avenging gods and penal woes shall find;
Where strict inquiring Justice shall bewray
The crimes committed in the realms of day.
The impartial judge the rigid law declares,
No more to be reversed by penitence or prayers.
Strophe IV.
But in the happy fields of light,
Where Phoebus with an equal ray
Illuminates the balmy night,
And gilds the cloudless day,
In peaceful, unmolested joy,
The good their smiling hours employ.
Them no uneasy wants constrain
To vex the ungrateful soil,
To tempt the dangers of the billowy main,
And break their strength with unabating toil,
A frail disastrous being to maintain.
But in their joyous calm abodes,
The recompense of justice they receive;
And in the fellowship of gods,
Without a tear, eternal ages live.
While banished by the fates from joy and rest,
Intolerable woes the impious soul infest.
Antistrophe IV.
But they who, in true virtue strong,
The third purgation can endure;
And keep their minds from fraudful wrong
And guilt’s contagion, pure;
They through the starry paths of Jove
To Saturn’s blissful seat remove:
Where fragrant breezes, vernal airs,
Sweet children of the main,
Purge the blest island from corroding cares,
And fan the bosom of each verdant plain:
Whose fertile soil immortal fruitage bears:
Trees, from whose naming branches flow,
Arrayed in golden bloom, refulgent beams;
And flowers of golden hue, that blow
On the fresh borders of their parent streams.
These by the blest in solemn triumph worn,
Their unpolluted hands and clustering locks adorn.
Epode IV.
Such is the righteous will, the high behest
Or Rhadamanthus, ruler of the blest;
The just assessor of the throne divine,
On which, high raised above all gods, recline,
Linked in the golden bands of wedded love,
The great progenitors of thundering Jove.
There, in the number of the blest enrolled,
Like Cadmus, Peleus, heroes famed of old;
And young Achilles, to those isles removed,
Soon as, by Thetis won, relenting Jove approved.