A few months ago the authorities of the British Museum announced the discovery of some of the lost odes of Bacchylides, the contemporary of Pindar. Hitherto Bacchylides has been known only in fragments, none of them exceeding a dozen lines in length. Now we are promised over a thousand lines, of which as many as two hundred belong to a single ode. The discovery is, thus, one of considerable importance. Directly, it will reveal Bacchylides himself more fully; indirectly, it may be expected to throw light on many points of collateral interest. One such point is the relation of Pindar to the poetry of his time, another is the value of the literary judgments of some of the ancient critics. By both the links just mentioned the subject of this paper associates itself with the discovery.

The author of the Treatise on the Sublime frames an estimate of Bacchylides which seems likely to be confirmed by a fuller knowledge of his poems. He ranks him below Pindar for the same reason that he ranks Hyperides below Demosthenes. Correctness is not to be compared, says he, with genius: flawlessness is no match for inspiration. It is not a little remarkable that, in the case of Hyperides no less than in that of Bacchylides, the preservation of papyrus manuscripts in the sands of Egypt has enabled the modern world to test and verify this estimate.