Her lyrist had to sing of pallone-matches instead of Panhellenic games; to celebrate the heroic conquest of two Turkish galleys by a Tuscan fleet, instead of Marathon and Salamis; to praise S.Lucy and S.Paul with tepid fervor, instead of telling how Rhodes swam at her god's bidding upward from the waves.
One example will serve as well as many to illustrate the false attitude assumed by Chiabrera when he posed as a new Pindar in the midst of seventeenth-century Italians.

I will select the Ode to Don Cesare d'Este.

There is something pathetically ridiculous, in this would-be swan of the Dircean fount, this apostle of pagan virtues, admonishing the heir of Alfonso II to prove himself an obedient son of the Church by relinquishing his Duchy of Ferrara to the Holy See.

The poet asks him, in fine classic phrases, whether he could bear to look on desecrated altars, confessionals without absolving priests, chapels without choristers, a people barred with bolt and lock from Paradise.

How trivial are earthly compared with heavenly crowns! How vulgar is the love of power and gold! The exhortation, exquisite enough in chastened style, closes with this hypocritical appeal to Cesare's aristocratic prejudices: Parli la plebe a suo volere, e pensi-- Non con la plebe hanno da gir gli Estensi.
That is to say, nobility demands that the House of Este should desert its subjects, sacrifice its throne, crawl at a Pontiff's feet, and starve among a crowd of disthroned princes, wrapping the ragged purple of its misery around it till it, too, mixes with the people it contemns.
Hopeless as the venture was, Chiabrera made it the one preoccupation of his life, in these untoward circumstances, to remodel Italian poetry upon the Greek pattern.