PREFACE

Summary

THE Bacchylides papyrus was brought from Egypt to the British Museum in the autumn of 1896; and the editio princeps, by Dr F. G. Kenyon, appeared in 1897. We have thus acquired a large body of work by an author previously known only through scanty fragments; and the value of that acquisition is enhanced by the class to which it belongs. Of all the poets who gave lyric expression to Greek feeling and fancy in the interval between the age of Epos and the age of Drama, Pindar alone, before this discovery, could be estimated in the light of considerable remains. The fragments of the rest, exquisitely beautiful as they sometimes are, afford little more than glimpses of the genius and the art which produced them. Now there is a second representative of Greek song who can be judged by a series of complete compositions. Bacchylides has, of course, no pretension to be a poet of the same order as Pindar; it might rather be said that part of the interest which he possesses for us arises from the marked difference of poetical rank. In reading his odes, so elegant, so transparently clear, so pleasing in their graceful flow of narrative, often so bright in their descriptive touches, and at moments so pathetic, we feel that this is a singer who, moving in a lower sphere than Pindar, must also have been more immediately intelligible to the common Hellenic sense.