Pindar’s Isthmian 8, praising an athletic victory—in the pankration—at the festival of the Isthmia in 478 BCE, also praises the military victories of European Greeks who fought against the armed forces of the Persian Empire in the sea battle of Salamis in 480 BCE and in the land battle of Plataea in 479 BCE. These military victories are relevant here to the athletic victory, since the victor in the pankration was a young man who hailed from the island state of Aegina. This state was at the time credited with a major contribution to the victory of the European Greeks allied against the Persian Empire in the sea battle of Salamis, as we see from the relevant narrative at Scroll 8 in the History of Herodotus as also in an ostentatious reference that we find in Pindar, I.5.48. These victorious European Greeks, including the Aeginetans, styled themselves as Hellēnes or ‘Hellenes’, which was a politicized name that stood in contrast to the self-description of the Asiatic Greeks who fought in the sea battle of Salamis on the side of the Persian Empire: those defeated Greeks, in accordance with the politics of the empire, were known simply as Ionians (details and relevant bibliography in Nagy 2017.06.25, especially at §§43–50). In terms of Hellenic ideology, it would have been politically inappropriate to celebrate in victory odes the military victory of any single Hellenic state over another: only athletic victories would have been fair game, as it were, for celebration by way of Panhellenic consensus. But the victory of the Hellenes against the forces of the Persian Empire was another matter: in this case, it was in fact appropriate to celebrate by way of Panhellenic consensus. But even here we see a political problem, since not all the European Greek states had fought on the side of the Hellenes. Some of these states sided with the Persian Empire—or, to say it in more overtly political terms, they sided with the Mēdoi ‘Medes’, that is, they ‘medized’ (Greek mēdizein). Embarrassingly for Pindar, his native city of Thebes was the most prominent of the European Greek states that ‘medized’, as we see most clearly in the narration presented by Herodotus in Scroll 8 of his History. To offset this embarrassment, Pindar’s wording in Isthmian 8 highlights the reciprocity between the Aeginetan victor and the Theban poet—a reciprocity that is built into the victory ode— by elaborating on a mythological link between Aegina and Thebes. See the comment at I.8.15–23. By way of this reciprocity, the victory ode created by the poet of Thebes can become a lutron ‘compensation’ not only for the kamatoi ‘pains’ taken by the athlete in achieving victory, I.8.1, but also for the pains taken in the Panhellenic effort to achieve military victory over the invaders—pains that include the personal pain experienced by the poet in admitting the compromised situation of his native city.