Book 3 of the CPAE. The risings of the southern constellations. The settings of the southern constellations. The risings of the zodiacal constellations. The settings of the zodiacal constellations. The 24 hourly circles.

This chapter addresses the crucial interpretative issue of the relationship between performance and text in Pindar’s odes. What elements do we have to reconstruct the circumstances of their first performances? How important are these elements for the interpretation of the poems? In what manner was the wording of the texts themselves meant to reflect and interact with the extra-textual elements pertaining to the performance?The first parts of the chapter focus on the less studied fragments of Pindar’s cultic poetry, offering both a survey of the evidence and some novel interpretative contributions. The following sections move to the examination of the epinicians and the enkomia, as well as the question of the reperformances of his poems. The analysis of the whole corpus highlights the productive tension between the emphasis on performance and the emphasis on the text’s capability to transcend it, arguing that this is one of the key defining traits of Pindaric poetry.

Insofar as his poems generally take the mimetic form of a monologue unfolding in the present, Pindaric poetry is the Pindaric speaking voice. Far more of the corpus, furthermore, is directly concerned with the speaking subject than with any other individual. But the identity and functions of this prominent and indeed all-encompassing voice have been a persistent source of fascination and puzzlement, not least in their relationship to Pindar of Thebes as a historical individual. Better understanding the scare quotes around the ‘I’ in the title of this chapter can help us to better understand Pindar’s poetry. Scholars have formulated various ways to refer to the speaking voice, and the accumulation of terminology reflects the complexity of the topic. This chapter offers a taxonomy of voices and then criticises that taxonym. It discusses the ‘bardic I’, the ‘first-person indefinite’, the authorial voice, and the choral voice and then argues that the victor never speaks in epinicians. A conclusion briefly ties these threads together.

This chapter investigates Pindar’s construction of the relationships by which communities are constituted: relationships between families, individuals, and the polis; between the inhabitants of the polis and their past; and between different polis communities.  It surveys civic values, as well as the passages where Pindar discusses specific constitutional forms.  Because Pindar’s lyric expresses political issues through the lens of poetic concerns, assimilating civic and military conflict to vicissitude, it maps some of the strategies by which Pindar subsumes the political into the poetic.  A final focus is the nature of Pindar’s Panhellenism and the connection of Panhellenism to elite mobility.  Pindar’s Panhellenism projects competitively local claims for eminence into a broad Greek arena and characterises the mythico-historical past of Greek cities as one of migration and elite movement. The interaction of local identity with the Panhellenic arena is thus driven by the mobility of heroic and then athletic elites.

In recent years, as material culture has become more central to the study of all aspects of the ancient Mediterranean and new materialism has gained greater traction across a variety of academic disciplines, growing numbers of scholars have begun to explore how material objects and notions of materiality feature in Pindar’s work. This chapter offers an introduction to some of the main tendencies of such work. It discusses Pindar’s propensity to speak about his songs in terms normally applied to material crafts, such as weaving or carpentry; the role of tools and instruments in Pindar’s conception of composition and creation, both as applied to song and in a broader sense; the materials of the built environment; Pindar’s relationship with the contexts of his musical performances, real and imaginary; and the earth itself as a significant facet of Pindar’s conception of the material world.

In the Anglo-Saxon sources, the author argues, the essential duality of Christ is spatially conceived as an effective way of teaching humans about Ascension theology as well as about faith, the imitation of Christ, moral action, and spiritual responsibility. This chapter begins with an identification of the basic Ascension motifs that are introduced, if only incipiently, in scriptural sources. It examines the contributions of patristic authors to the development of the theological and thematic content of the Ascension. The chapter presents the themes and doctrines that especially prepare the materialist and spatially conceived treatment of the Ascension that Anglo-Saxons preferred in their preaching and teaching. The initial theological development of these Old and New Testament themes occurs in early patristic literature, moving from the simple introduction of basic motifs to their exegesis.

This introduction briefly glances at Pindar’s poetry and its later reception so as to set the scene for the volume that follows. Before outlining the shape of the book and its chapters, it surveys the recent history of Pindaric criticism so as to provide the reader with a sense of its wider intellectual context.

Greek melic poetry is characterized by its pragmatic features. It is thus natural to find strong differentiation within it: this is what we mean by the word genre in this context. Pindar’s genres are distinguished by their occasion, whether ‘secular’ or cultic; by their mode of performance; and by the identity of the chorus. These distinctive elements could overlap to produce hybrids. When Pindar’s oeuvre was gathered and catalogued during the Alexandrian period, each ode needed to be sorted into a ‘genre’, as indicated by its dominant characteristics. Of the seventeen books into which Pindar’s work was subdivided, the four books of epinicians have reached us practically intact by way of medieval transmission; of the other books, fragments of various lengths come from the papyri or indirect transmission, posing very different problems. In the case of the papyri, the main difficulty lies in the material conditions of fragmentation and legibility. When it comes to indirect transmission, we must consider the intentions of the quotation and the reliability of the witnesses, which is greater if stylistic or grammatical in nature, lesser if philosophical or otherwise ideological.

This chapter examines key ideas concerning the dialect and metre in which Pindar’s poems were written, as well as the story of the transmission of his works from his day, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, then down to our own times.