Victory Odes

be grey
Is of all gainsaying unperilled⁠—O yea,
It giveth me fullest assurance aye
For extolling thy name with manifold praising.
All hail! This song o’er the sea-foam white
Like Tyrian merchandise lo, I have brought thee.
Let thine eyes then smile on the Kastor-strain
That my fingers from chords Aeolian drew:
O greet it thou with the honour due
To the seven-stringed lute. To thyself be true,
To the royal wisdom the years have taught thee.
’Tis from children alone that the ape doth gain

Strophe 4

The praise of beauty, is beauteous ever!
Rhadamanthus is homed in the Isles of the Blest,
For the fruit of his soul was uncankered of guile:
No pleasure he hath in the treacherous wile
Of the whisperer working by calumnies vile.
The secret speakings of slander never
Can be openly fought and for ever repressed.
There is nothing of man in them⁠—nay, ’tis the slinking
Spirit of foxes they show; and yet
From his cunning what gain doth the sly fox reap?
As for me⁠—while the rest of the net-tackle deep
In the briny darkness doth toilsomely sweep
The sea-floor⁠—I, like the float unsinking
Am riding the waves high over the net.

Antistrophe 4

In a city of honest men unavailing
Is the trickster’s babble, yet still he essays,
Fawning on all men, the toils to twine
Of his subtlety. Never his vaunt shall be mine⁠—
“To a friend he I friend, to a foe malign!
As a wolf will I covertly track him, assailing
This side and that side, by crooked ways.”
In what state soever a people be dwelling,
’Tis the man of straightforward speech alway
That unto the foremost place attains;
Whether it be where a despot reigns,
Or where the rabble hot-headed strains
Against use and wont, or where sages excelling
In wisdom the helm of the commonweal sway.

Epode 4

Strive not against God, who exalts at his pleasure
Now one, now setteth another on high.
Yet doth not even His will seem right
Unto envious ones, but they strain over-tight
The line, and their own hearts so do they smite
With a wound whose bitterness none may measure,
Ere the prize be gained for the which they sigh.
Nay, better it is that a man bear lightly
The yoke of Fate on his neck that lies.
But he makes for his feet a perilous road
Who backward lashes against the goad.
But on me be this fair fortune bestowed,
To dwell among them which walk uprightly,
And to be well-pleasing in good men’s eyes.

III

For Hiero of Syracuse, on victories won by his racehorse, Pherenikus, in 482 and 478 BC. Probable date of Ode, 474, when Hiero was suffering from the disease of which he died in 467.

Strophe 1

I were fain⁠—if my tongue might breathe the prayer
Which on all lips trembles⁠—that Philyra’s son,
That yet alive old Cheiron were
Who perished from earth, ah, long agone,
Even heaven-born Kronos’ seed, who of yore
A sceptre of wide dominion bore⁠—
That now in the glens of Pelion
That man-brute reigned in the woods once more
Who was gracious-hearted to men when of old
He dwelt in the shadowy forest-land
Where he fostered Asklepius kindly-souled,
The lord of leechcraft, whose healing hand
From the limbs of the stricken banished pain
With salves by the which each malady’s bane
From their frames was banned.

Antistrophe 1

The daughter of Phlegyas, lord of the car,
Not yet with help of the Travail-queen
Had borne that Healer renowned afar,
Ere by Artemis’ golden arrows keen
In her bride-bower stricken to death she lay,
And trod the unreturning way
Unto Hades’ halls; for Apollo had seen
The transgression that slew his love in a day.
For the wrath of the Sons of Zeus not in vain
Burns. In her folly she dared think scorn
Of his anger: unknown to her sire had she ta’en
To her arms a human lover, forsworn
To her bridal troth, to her plighted word,
To the love of Apollo the Archer-lord
Of the hair unshorn,

Epode 1

Though she bare ’neath her zone a God’s pure seed,
Yet the marriage-feast’s coming she would not abide;
Not she of the full-voiced song took heed,
Such song as the young girl-mates of the bride
Merrily chant in the eventide.
But she longed for a love that was otherwhere
With the passion that oft is the soul’s death-snare.
For a people foolish beyond compare
Is found among mortals, who scorn things near,
And gaze upon things that be far away,
And chase an ever-elusive prey
With hopes whose fulfilment shall never appear.

Strophe 2

Even with such overmastering might
Did unbridled desire o’er the spirit sweep
Of Koronis in queenly vesture dight,
That she dared in the unblest couch to sleep
Of a stranger faring from Arcady.
But she ’scaped not the all-beholding eye
Of the God⁠—albeit where myriad sheep
To his altar at Pytho be led to die
Was the Lord of the Temple then⁠—for their lust
By the all-divining mind was descried.
To his soul’s inner vision did Phoebus trust
As it were to a seer enthroned at his side.
He knows not delusion, whom neither man
Nor God by thought or by action can
Deceive or misguide.

Antistrophe 2

So when of her harlotry Phoebus was ware
With the stranger Ischys Eilatus’ son,
And her godless guile in his sight lay bare,
Then sent he against that faithless one
His sister Artemis rushing with might
Of a Goddess whose arrows resistlessly smite
Unto Lakereia, by whose walls shine
The mere Boebeïs’ waters bright,
Whereby did the woman unwedded abide
Whom her evil genius misled to the doom
Which destroyed her; and many a neighbour died
With her, by her sin dragged down to the tomb,
As when on a mountain the fire that hath leapt
From one spark over a forest hath swept,
And doth wholly consume.

Epode 2

But now when her kinsmen had laid the maid
In the midst of the pinewood walls of the pyre,
And when round about her upleaping played
The splendour-light of the Lord of Fire,
Spake Apollo: “I will not by death so dire
Endure that mine own son also should die
In the flames wherein doth his mother lie!”
He spake, and at one stride stood thereby,
And he caught up the child from the corse, and sprang
The flames asunder. That babe he brought
To Magnesia’s Centaur, by him