Page "Bacchylides" Paragraph 62

Bacchylides's image of the poet as an eagle winging across the sea was not original – Pindar had already used it earlier ( Nemean Odes 5. 20 – 21 ).

In fact, in the same year that both poets celebrated Pherenicus's Olympic victory, Pindar also composed an ode for Theron of Acragas ( Olympian 2 ), in which he likens himself to an eagle confronted with chattering ravens – possibly a reference to Bacchylides and his uncle.

It is possible in that case that Bacchylides's image of himself as an eagle in Ode 5 was a retort to Pindar.

Moreover Bacchylides's line " So now for me too countless paths extend in all directions " has a close resemblance to lines in one of Pindar's Isthmian Odes ( 1. 1 – 2 ), " A thousand ways ... open on every side widespread before me " but, as the date of Pindar's Isthmian Ode is uncertain, it is not clear in this case who was imitating whom.

According to Kenyon, Pindar's idionsyncratic genius entitles him to the benefit of a doubt in all such cases: "... if there be actual imitation at all, it is fairly safe to conclude that it is on the part of Bacchylides.

" In fact one modern scholar has observed in Bacchylides a general tendency towards imitation, sometimes approaching the level of quotation: in this case, the eagle simile in Ode 5 may be thought to imitate a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter ( 375 – 83 ), and the countless leaves fluttering in the wind on " the gleaming headlands of Ida ", mentioned later in the ode, recall a passage in Iliad ( 6. 146 – 9 ).

A tendency to imitate other poets is not peculiar to Bacchylides, however – it was common in ancient poetry, as for example in a poem by Alcaeus ( fragment 347 ), which virtually quotes a passage from Hesiod ( Works and Days 582 – 8 ).