SOURCE: "Pindar, the Last Aristocrat." In The Great Age of Greek Literature, pp. 85-103. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

In the following essay, Hamilton relates Pindar's poetic achievement as the greatest interpreter of the Greek aristocracy at its greatest moment.

"Pindar astounds," says Dr. Middleton in The Egoist, "but Homer brings the more sustaining cup. One is a fountain of prodigious ascent; the other, the unsounded purple sea of marching billows."

The problem anyone faces who would write about Pindar is how to put a fountain of prodigious ascent into words. Homer's unsounded purple sea is in comparison easy to describe. Homer tells a great story simply and splendidly. Something of his greatness and simplicity and splendor is bound to come through in any truthful account of him; the difficult thing would be to obscure it completely. The same is true of the tragedians. The loftiness and...