Excerpt from Bacchylides, the Poems and Fragments: Edited With Introduction, Notes, and Prose Translation

He certainly deserves to find readers in the modern world also. Not only is his work attractive in itself; it is a good introduction to the study of Greek lyric poetry: in particular, I believe that students would find it helpful in facilitating the approach to Pindar. The text of Bacchylides is uniformly easy, except in those places where the manuscript is defective or corrupt. The contents abound in matter of poetical and mythological interest - Croesus, saved from the pyre to which he had doomed himself, and carried by Apollo to the Hyper boreans Heracles meeting the shade of Meleager in the nether world, listening to the story of that hero's fate, and forming the resolve which is to seal his own the daughters of Proetus driven by the Argive Hera from Tiryns, and healed by Artemis at Lusi Theseus, diving after the ring of Minos, and welcomed by Amphitrite in the halls of Poseidon.

It is by considerations such as these that the scope of the present edition has been determined. I have endeavoured to combine criticism and interpretation with a treatment of the poems as literature; and thus to contribute, though it be only a little, towards obtaining for them that place in our Greek studies which they appear well fitted to hold. For such a purpose it was not enough to explain and illustrate the odes themselves; it was necessary also to aim at conveying some idea of the surroundings amidst which the poet worked, of his relation to contemporaries, and of his place in the historical development of the Greek lyric.

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