Pindar -- Edith Hamiton's criticism

Edith Hamilton, a lifelong scholar of the classics, wrote in her The Greek Way (1942): "Pindar is austere. Splendor can be cold, and Pindar glitters but never warms. He is hard, severe, passionless, remote.... He never steps down from his frigid eminence. Aristocrats did not stoop to lies, and his pen would never deviate from the strict truth in praising any triumph.... 'Now do I believe,' he says, 'that the sweet words of Homer make great beyond the fact the story of Odysseus, and upon these falsities through Homer's winged skill there broods a mysterious spell. His art deceives us.... But as for me, whoever has examined can declare if I speak crooked words.' Again, 'In ways of singleheartedness may I walk through life, not holding up a glory fair-seeming but false.' and in another ode:

Forge thy tongue on an anvil of truth

And what flies up, though it be but a spark,

Shall have weight.

Nevertheless, also strictly in the aristocratic tradition, he would leave the truth unsaid if it was ugly or unpleasant, offensive to delicate feeling. 'Believe me,' he writes, 'not every truth is the better for showing its face unveiled.' "