Pindar's πολλῶν πείρατα συντανύσαις, κ.τ.λ. began καιρὸν εἰ ϕθέγξαιο. καιρός is supposed to mean ‘due measure’, ‘fitness’, ‘opportunity’, etc. But, if we look to the early evidence we shall find reason to believe that it is not a mere abstraction. It never occurs in Homer, only once in Hesiod: καιρὸς δʾ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἄριστος, from which little can be inferred. But Pindar and the tragedians have many instances, some vague like Hesiod's and some more instructive. Thus Pindar says ‘I have lighted upon many themes, hitting the καιρός with no false word (καιρὸν οὐ ψεύδει βαλών)’, and in the Agamemnon, after the fall of Troy, Aeschylus says that Ζεὺς ξένιος (against whom Alexander = Paris had offended) has taken vengeance

and Euripides speaks of men ‘aiming the bow beyond the καιρός (τόξον ἐντείνοντες…καιροũ πέρα)’. It is clear that καιρός meant something like ‘mark, target’. This could not arise out of a sense ‘due measure’ or ‘opportunity’. On the other hand ‘mark’, while it may explain the use approximating in significance to ‘due measure’ as in our ‘wide of the mark’, ‘overshoot the mark’, etc., will explain neither ‘opportunity’ nor the use by which Euripides refers to a part of the body where a weapon can penetrate to the life within (above all, within the head) as a καιρός, speaking of a man as εἰς καιρὸν τυπείς, ‘struck in(to) a καιρός’.