I was reading Pindar, enjoying the olives and laurels and the

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I was reading Pindar, enjoying the olives and laurels and the balmy breath of the Olympics in our routines, but his work let me down. I thought he was going to be a supreme poet of imagery and metaphor, a great singer of the beauty of the human body and soul as mirrors where the Cosmos could see itself and rejoice on its own grandeur. But instead he is not only confused, not only far more interested in names of heroes and myths than in the humanity behind them, but also his metaphors are not striking, not sublime, not daring and breathtaking.

Wikipedia tells me:

>Pindar (c. 522 – c. 443 BC) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian wrote, "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence, characteristics which, as Horace rightly held, make him inimitable."

Yes, his work is one of the best preserved on antiquity, yet I don’t know how it can be. The few fragments of Sappho promise a much greater poetic mind, and, as a poet, Aeschylus (to me the greatest poet of ancient Greece, with Homer) is by far superior to Pindar in every way.