Unity as a ‘problem’ in Pindaric criticism: an overview

Unity, an issue in literary criticism more broadly, is said to be the cardinal issue of Pindaric criticism.Footnote ¹ Referred to as the ‘problem of unity’,Footnote ² it invites us to reflect on what kind of a problem this is. Usually, it is regarded as a problem of Pindaric criticism. The problem is then the product of a discrepancy between the critic’s expectation of what the poem ought to be about and their perception of what it is actually about, and the critic’s task is to eliminate the discrepancy, the ‘problem’ being one either to be solved or else to be revealed as somehow a non-problem. One simple solution is flatly to deny the presence of unity in Pindar’s odes.Footnote ³ The requirement for unity and coherence, it has been pointed out, is a ‘cultural variable’.Footnote ⁴ It may thus be mistaken to impose a ‘centripetal aesthetic’ on poems that were themselves more ‘centrifugally conceived’.Footnote ⁵ On the other hand, others have insisted on the presence of unity in Pindar’s odes, but have differed as to how to define it, wherein they suppose unity to reside, whether they require a high or a low level of unity from a Pindaric ode,Footnote ⁶ and whether they consider all of Pindar’s odes to be answerable to the same requirement of unity.Footnote ⁷

The many different approaches that have been taken in scholarship to the ‘problem of unity’ have been surveyed and critiqued in several valuable histories of Pindaric criticism.Footnote ⁸ This discussion will not attempt to replicate these. Instead, it will offer a cursory overview of some trends in scholarship, before taking a different tack, suggesting how unity is problematized in Pindar’s poetry itself, rather than in the criticism of the poetry.

The most fundamental, perhaps naïve, approach taken in Pindaric criticism to the problem of unity has been to posit a single ‘basic thought’ (summa sententia, Grundgedanke) that the whole poem is seeking to convey, frequently identified with a maxim at the start of the poem; this approach typified nineteenth-century Pindaric criticism.Footnote ⁹ Thus, the summa sententia of Pythian 5 was discovered in the gnome in the first five lines of the poem.Footnote ¹⁰ This approach has been criticized for trading on a ‘fallacy of paraphrasable content’.Footnote ¹¹ The idea that a work of art can be summed up in a single commonplace ought not to hold more appeal with epinician than, for instance, with tragedy.Footnote ¹² Nor should the gnomai of a Pindaric ode be assumed to deliver unqualified truths, but rather partial, defeasible ones.Footnote ¹³ For all that, there is something to be salvaged in the Grundgedanke method.Footnote ¹⁴ It is plausible that gnomai contribute to the meaning of the ode, even if they cannot be said themselves to constitute that meaning.

The attempt to find unity in a single recurring image incurs a similar objection:Footnote ¹⁵ images, like gnomai, are organic, evolving things, not readily susceptible to paraphrase.Footnote ¹⁶ Images, again, may contribute to unity, but they do not suffice to confer it. Still, they may play an important auxiliary role in the creation of unity.Footnote ¹⁷

‘Historical allegory’ is a method, employed by ancient as well as modern scholars, of creating a link between the mythological narrative and the praise of the victor (and perhaps also gnomai).Footnote ¹⁸ The idea that positing some historical circumstance can suddenly unlock all the arcana of a Pindaric ode represents this approach in an untenably extreme form.Footnote ¹⁹ Even when the critic may be justified in positing some historical circumstance of which the mythological narrative is an allegorical reflection, this can only produce a partial account of the unity of an ode.Footnote ²⁰ It is also unsatisfactory when literary criticism devolves into a (pseudo-)historical guessing-game (of course, it is also fully possible to conduct historicizing criticism in a careful and informed way).

At the opposite end of the critical spectrum to historical allegory are structuralist approaches to unity: most influentially, Bundy’s Studia Pindarica.Footnote ²¹ Such studies tackle the perception that ‘the movement within an epinikion often appears random and the ode’s structure incoherent’.Footnote ²² Armed with proper ‘knowledge of the expected parts and their order’, audiences, it is argued, were able to experience the odes as unities.Footnote ²³ Individual utterances that seem to lack relevance or cohesion with what preceded or followed are revealed to do so when subsumed under general categories: Bundy’s various motifs (in Bundy’s preferred spelling, ‘motives’), themes, and topics.Footnote ²⁴ Nothing, it turns out, is irrelevant or digressive: everything conduces to the programme of praise.Footnote ²⁵ Bundy does away with an abiding conception of Pindar’s poetry as having ‘a dual unity’,Footnote ²⁶ an ‘objective purpose’ (praise of the victor, the poet’s actual commission) and a ‘subjective purpose’ (the poet’s own personal agenda),Footnote ²⁷ a conception borne both of critics’ difficulty in relating some parts of the odes to the actual commission and also of a sense, which evidently Bundy did not share, that commissioned praise alone did not amount to real poetry.Footnote ²⁸

Various objections can be made: for instance, that Bundy elevates praise or the climactic naming of the victor (‘name cap’) to the status of a unifying factor;Footnote ²⁹ that he dismisses much that is essential to the poem (in particular, the mythical narratives) as mere ‘foil’ or ‘decorative’;Footnote ³⁰ that he overemphasizes the ‘linear development’ of ideas in an ode, at the expense of non-linear structures (such as ring-composition or counterpoint).Footnote ³¹ More fundamentally, it offers an understanding only on the abstract, not the concrete level (langue, not parole).Footnote ³² It is a bit like being told that a sentence is a perfectly-formed unity because it has a subject, verb, object, etc., but not what it may have meant for a particular person to have uttered the particular sentence to another particular person in a particular situation. Further, the epinician poet risks, on this analysis, becoming little more than a shuffler of conventional elements.Footnote ³³

In the history of Pindaric criticism, the search for unity has too often been conducted in a monistic vein.Footnote ³⁴ Critics who have entered the battleground of Pindaric unity have typically contended that something, one thing, in the odes is being missed, and that systematically. For some, the critical desideratum is to make good deficiencies in their predecessors’ literary or historical sensibilities, by discovering a basic idea, underlying image, or presupposed historical circumstance that would confer unity.Footnote ³⁵ For others, it is a more general type of ignorance that needs remedying: for instance, of the rhetorical ‘grammar’ of epinician;Footnote ³⁶ of the nature of the odes’ occasions of performance, at civic festivals or symposia;Footnote ³⁷ of the heroizing tendency of fifth-century Greek culture, with its intrinsic capacity to conflate mythical heroes and athletic victors.Footnote ³⁸ A fundamental difference here is whether we opt to look inside or outside the ode for unity. Historicizing approaches are often opposed to text-immanent ones.Footnote ³⁹ Yet these are crucially misconceived as mutually exclusive. Approaches that sideline one or the other are unlikely to give more than a partial account of the problem.Footnote ⁴⁰ We should not be looking for a silver bullet to the problem of unity. Different aspects of the problem are capable of being illuminated by each of the approaches surveyed here. It is in fact the exclusive privileging of just one of these that has perpetuated the ‘problem’ of unity in Pindaric criticism. It will also be apparent how discussion of the problem of unity in Pindaric criticism is apt to become coextensive with the debate about how to conduct Pindaric criticism tout court.

Reacting to the deficiencies of the monistic approach, a number of scholars writing in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s concurred both that unity must result from the harmonious combination of multiple (or even ‘all’) features of an ode, and that this was realized in a unique way in each ode.Footnote ⁴¹ These scholars thus developed a suitably complex and holistic approach to the question of unity that was more adequate to the material; yet they avoided espousing general principles about Pindaric unity such as might be transferable from one poem to another. Alone the ability to demonstrate unity in the most difficult odes (such as Pyth.2, Pyth.11, Nem.7) was taken to imply a fortiori that some other demonstration of unity would be possible also for the less difficult odes.Footnote ⁴²

The term ‘new perspectives’ in this article’s title refers to the intention of espousing some general principles about Pindaric unity that may be transferable from one poem to another.

Unity as a theme in Pindaric epinician

We should remember that Pindar’s ‘digressions’ are not just a preoccupation of his critics (ancient and modern).Footnote ⁴³ Digression is thematized by Pindar in his earliest datable ode (Pyth. 10.53–4). The poet claims to feel himself ‘pulled’ in a particular direction (Nem. 4.35; cf. Pyth. 11.38–40, Nem. 3.26-8). ‘To an extent … the problem of unity is provoked by Pindar himself.’Footnote ⁴⁴ The problem of unity here is neither a critical problem to be solved nor a critical chimaera, but a real feature of the poetry that demands to be recognized and appreciated. Callimachus, in the Aetia and Hecale, and Apollonius, in the Argonautica, make play with ideas of poetic unity.Footnote ⁴⁵ These Alexandrian poets were reacting to Aristotle’s strictures that poetry should have a ‘unified plot’ and ‘unitary action’ (Poetics ch. 8). If Pindar were doing something similar, then he would be engaging with ideas of unity in a pre-Aristotelian and pre-theoretical context; poetic practice would here (as often) be well in advance of theory, and Pindar would be in the vanguard, anticipating (here as in certain other respects) the Alexandrians.Footnote ⁴⁶ On such a scenario, Pindar’s own thematizations of (ir)relevance would not be just part of his ‘oral subterfuge’, or pretence of stream-of-consciousness composition.Footnote ⁴⁷ They would be rather a considered and self-conscious engagement with notions of poetic composition. Such ‘modern’ concepts (if that is what they are) should not be foisted on an ancient poet lightly; only a reading of the texts themselves can determine whether we are warranted in attributing them to Pindar. Pindar’s handling of action, time, and place are obvious places to look for any self-conscious engagement with unity. These were singled out in the Renaissance and Early Modern period as the ‘Classical (or Aristotelian) unities’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although that label is problematic, the Attic tragedians themselves were keenly aware of the significance of action, time, and place, and could handle them boldly; so too, already, could Homer.Footnote ⁴⁹ Also relevant is the modern concept of deixis, which implies a (singular) origo, the implied point of reference for pronominal, spatial, and temporal indexical statements, e.g. those featuring ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The idea of statements being referred to such a stable origo (or not) overlaps with ideas of centripetalism or centrifugalism in an ode.Footnote ⁵¹

The present discussion cannot be comprehensive. Its aim is to indicate certain tendencies of Pindar’s epinician poetry, by drawing eclectically on the extant corpus. The tendencies in question are not evidenced in every single ode, and perhaps no one ode evidences them all at once. Nevertheless, the tendencies are real and demonstrable. The tendencies in question concern the creation of multiple dynamic equilibria between diversifying (or centrifugal) and unifying (or centripetal) treatment of various elements in the ode, and the offsetting or counterpointing of these against each other. The approach taken here is necessarily a generalizing one. It is an alternative to analysing all (or, in practice, selected) odes individually, seeking to demonstrate unity, and perhaps ‘consistency of thought’ or ‘coherency of expression’Footnote ⁵² or ‘compositional unity’Footnote ⁵³ in each one. That approach (‘the integrated interpretation of individual poems’)Footnote ⁵⁴ has been adopted fruitfully elsewhere,Footnote ⁵⁵ though with the drawback, as noted above, of not leading to readily transferable or generalizable conclusions.

Unity of action?

Epinician does not have a ‘unified plot’ or ‘unitary action’ of the kind envisaged by Aristotle. It has, typically, two types of action, one (at least) involving mythological heroes, and one (at least) involving the laudandus and/or relative(s).Footnote ⁵⁶ ‘The problem of unity … resolves itself ultimately into the problem of the relationship between the myth and the rest of the ode.’Footnote ⁵⁷

For long stretches of mythological narration, Pindar and Bacchylides seem to behave very much like the ‘lyric epic’ poets of the sixth century bce (exemplified for us by Stesichorus).Footnote ⁵⁸ In their mythological narratives, the epinician poets have their eyes trained on the canonical hexameter narratives of (especially) the Epic Cycle and Pseudo-Hesiod (less frequently, Homer), which, just like their lyric epic predecessors, they are concerned to transpose from recited hexameter verse into the sung-and-danced medium of choral lyric: Nemean 10 does this with the Cypria, Pythian 3 with the Coronis-ehoeë of the Catalogue of Women, and Bacchylides Ode 13 with Book 15 of the Iliad.Footnote ⁵⁹ Stesichorus, however, had the luxury of performing extensive heroic mythological narratives in choral song without having to accommodate any specific occasion or patron.Footnote ⁶⁰ The epinician poets were differently placed. Theirs was an occasional, commissioned poetry. The problem of the divergence of the mythical narration from the occasion or commission is variously registered in ancient critical discourse on epinician poetry. The Simonidean biographical tradition featured an anecdote in which a patron withheld half the fee, telling Simonides to get the rest from the Dioscuri, to whom he had devoted half the praise (Simon. fr. 510 PMG). A Pindaric scholion records the criticism that the mythical narrative of Nemean 1 ‘has no germaneness to the present circumstances’ (Σ 1.49c).

The problem of a perceived mismatch between the performance occasion (‘the here-and-now’) and the mythological narration (‘the there-and-then’) is not confined to epinician. In antiquity it was cavilled against Phrynichus and Aeschylus, contemporaries of the epinician poets, that their tragedies, dealing with heroic mythological subjects, had ‘nothing to do with Dionysus’, the point being that tragedy, performed at Dionysiac festivals (Dionysia, Lenaea), ought to have been drawing its subject matter from Dionysiac myth.Footnote ⁶¹ One modern scholarly response to the apparent disjunction of the there-and-then with the here-and-now in tragedy is to posit that the subject matter of the earliest choral songs out of which tragedy developed had in fact originally been Dionysiac myth, and that the heroic myths favoured by historical tragedy are extensions of or, more or less obliquely, analogically related to Dionysiac myth and are therefore able to deputize for it.Footnote ⁶²

The equivalent argument, that the heroic myth narrated is analogically related to the patron’s achievement(s), is actually easier to make with epinician. An analogical relation between the two types of action is occasionally explicit. In Bacchylides’ third ode, Hiero is said, like Croesus, to have made many dedications at Delphi and to have thus secured Apollo’s favour (61–6). In Pindar’s Pythian 2, Cinyras’ celebration in song by the Cyprians, in gratitude for some service or other, is explicitly paralleled with Hiero’s celebration in song by the maiden(s) of Locri, for saving them from the dangers of war (15–20). How far to press the analogy even when it is made explicit, beyond what is made explicit, remains a key critical problem. ‘Myths are examples, but are also different.’Footnote ⁶³ The question remains, how different? What details are to be pressed and how far? How applicable, for instance, are Croesus’ posthumous translation or Cinyras’ hero cult to Hiero?

To speak of ‘analogical relations’ is, crucially, to recognize both divergence and convergence between the two types of action. The type of analogy with which epinician operates is always eclectic, sometimes eccentric, never a thoroughgoing or systematic allegory. Analogical relations come only sporadically into more-or-less sharp focus. We are thus entitled to say that there is both a centrifugal and centripetal principle in play.

Where an analogical relation between the mythical narration and the encomiastic occasion is not made explicit, the existence of such a relation may be intimated by certain formal features (for instance, by verbal echoes);Footnote ⁶⁴ or it may be intimated simply by the fact that the there-and-then and the here-and-now occupy metrically (and musically and choreographically) identical parts of the ode.Footnote ⁶⁵ An analogical relation is most forcefully suggested, however, when the there-and-then and the here-and-now converge in content. In Isthmian 6, the prayer of the Theban Heracles for the prowess of his Aeginetan host Telamon’s prospective son in the there-and-then converges with the prayer of Theban Pindar for the continuing prowess of his Aeginetan host Lampon’s son in the here-and-now.Footnote ⁶⁶ There is a similar, but less complete, convergence in Nemean 1: the Theban seer Tiresias’ prophecy of Heracles’ career corresponds to the Theban poet Pindar’s celebration of Chromius’ career.Footnote ⁶⁷ In Pythian 6, the devoted son Antilochus saves, at the cost of his own, the life of ‘horseman’ Nestor; this corresponds, with (humorous?) hyperbole, to the devoted son Thrasybulus ensuring the afterlife of the hippic victor Xenocrates, by commissioning the ode from Pindar.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Olympian 1, Pelops’ chariot race against Oenomaus in Elis corresponds to Hiero’s single-horse victory at Olympia, as well as to a hoped-for chariot victory at the same venue.Footnote ⁶⁹

The search for correspondences often takes us close to historical allegory.Footnote ⁷⁰ This method has led critics into absurd postulates, such as that Sogenes (Nemean 7) was killed by sunstroke or that Diagoras (Olympian 7) was an involuntary homicide.Footnote ⁷¹ These are pure ‘historical romances’.Footnote ⁷² However, such interpretative excesses do not mean that the critic is not often legitimately impelled to posit real-life correlates of mythical events. It would be comforting to think that anything relevant to the real-life situation was more or less securely inferable from the Pindaric text itself.Footnote ⁷³ We might, for instance, have inferred from Pythian 1.50–7 that Hiero had some physical infirmity like Philoctetes, even without the more specific information proffered in the scholia.Footnote ⁷⁴ More doubtful, however, is whether we could have made much headway with the comparison of Hiero and Cinyras at Pythian 2.15–20 without external assistance.Footnote ⁷⁵

We might say in general that there is a tension between Pindar and Bacchylides seeming to narrate myth like a lyric epic poet unfettered by any encomiastic occasion and their operating as epinician poets acutely conscious of the exigencies of their commission (compare Nem. 4.33–5).Footnote ⁷⁶ When the there-and-then and the here-and-now diverge, as for the bulk of most mythological narrations, a centrifugal principle holds sway. When, however, they converge, a contrary centripetal principle asserts itself. The epinician poets often selected whole myths or particular mythological variants, or introduced their own innovations, with a view to enabling the mythological narrative to align with the epinician occasion.Footnote ⁷⁷ There are, of course, odes in the epinician corpus that do not conform or whose analogical relations, if any, elude us. But there are sufficient examples that do conform to establish this firmly as a characteristic of epinician.

Unity of place?

It was very easy for places to proliferate in epinician. The most obvious differentiation of locales is that of the venue of performance (the ‘here’ of the ‘here-and-now’) and the setting of the mythological narrative (the ‘there’ of the ‘there-and-then’). There seems to be something like a soft rule that these should be distinct. The setting of the mythical narrative of Nemean 10, an Argive commission, is Laconia (61), even though Argos herself offered an embarrassment of mythological riches (2–20). Likewise, none of Pindar’s five Theban commissions have their extended mythical narrations set on Theban soil, despite an abundance of local mythological material (Isthm. 7.1–15), which is mined without qualms in Sicilian (Ol. 6.13–17, Nem. 1.35–72, 9.18–27) or Aeginetan commissions (Pyth. 8.39–56). Significant exceptions are few: Olympian 7 (Rhodes), Olympian 9 (Opus), Olympian 13 (Corinth), and Isthmian 6 (Aegina). The last of these is unusual and striking, since the same two localities, Aegina and Thebes, are in play in both the there-and-then and the here-and-now (see above). The strongly centripetal character of this ode is, however, exceptional. The longer mythological narratives of other Aeginetan commissions are not set in Aegina, but, preferentially, in Troy or Thebes.

Apart from the basic divergence of the locations of the there-and-then and the here-and-now, there may be proliferating locales even within the there-and-then (see below on Pyth. 4). So too are there within the here-and-now, where regularly there is divergence between (a) the place of performance (the laudandus’ hometown), (b) the venue of the victory or venues of the victories (when a victory catalogue is given), and (c) the place where the poem originates (the poet’s hometown). The distinctness of these is frequently emphasized; we are entitled therefore to recognize a centrifugal principle at work.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet it does not hold sway completely unchecked: a counterbalancing centripetal principle is often also in play. One or other of these three types locales may turn out to be identical,Footnote ⁷⁹ or the poet may contrive some other significant association between them.Footnote ⁸⁰

Likewise, although a centrifugal treatment of the there-and-then and the here-and-now seems to be the rule, there may be a balancing centripetalism. In Pythian 1, the mythological figure of Typhoeus, once reared in a cave in distant Cilicia (16–17), has been interred following his defeat by Zeus under Cyme and Aetna (17–20), precisely the sites where in the here-and-now the laudandus Hiero has, respectively, won a major naval battle (72–5) and founded a city (30–3). The ‘arrival motif’ can provide a link between the places of the there-and-then and the here-and-now. In Pythian 9, Telesicrates’ return to Cyrene leading with him ‘lovely Reputation’ (75) mirrors Apollo’s arrival at the same Cyrene leading as his bride the nymph Cyrene (5–13, 55–56a), although the bulk of the preceding mythological narrative had played out in Thessaly. In Pythian 1 and Pythian 9, despite initially divergent settings, we get punctual, climactic, convergences in place.

Place and unity are handled especially complexly in a long ode like Pythian 4. Cyrene, site of the ode’s performance, is the spatial origo of the here-and-now (1–2). Yet Medea’s long speech (9–58), a mini-epinician in itself,Footnote ⁸¹ effects a shift in the origo for nearly fifty lines.Footnote ⁸² ‘I’ is now Medea, not the poet (14, 27, 38, 40); ‘now’ is the time of the Argo’s sailing, not the time of the ode’s performance (42); ‘here’ is Thera, not Cyrene (14 [cf. 10], 20, 42, 51–2; cf. 258). In her speech, places multiply: Thera, Lake Triton (20), Taenarus (44), Delphi (53–5), and Libya (56). In the long, mythological primary narration that follows her speech (67–262), further places are added: Iolcus (77), Delphi again (163), Phasis (Colchis: 211–46), Lemnos (252–6). There are, moreover, multiple journeys: the Argo’s outward (203–12) and return (251) voyages; and the peregrinations of the descendants of Euphamus from Lemnos to, successively, Sparta, Thera, and finally Cyrene (256–62).

All this constitutes a quite disorienting centrifugalism. Yet there is also a centripetal side, made up of overlapping journeys. First, to and from Delphi, made variously by or on behalf of Pelias, Battus, and Arcesilas (3–8, 53–6, 59–67, 163, 259–62). Second, to Cyrene, made by Battus and, implicitly, by Arcesilas’ winning chariot team (7–8, 56–7; 1–3, cf. Pyth. 5.52–3). The poet is himself on a metaphorical ‘chariot journey’, whose route is ‘long’ – though the poet knows a ‘short-cut’ (247–8), which must take him back to Cyrene (259–62; cf. 276, 279). The ode ends with Thebes, and the poetic commission (299). Implicitly, the Cyrenean (ex-)exile Damophilus must make the journey to his hometown, Cyrene, from Pindar’s hometown of Thebes (299), like other such figures to whom Pindar similarly entrusts his odes (compare Nicasippus: Isthm. 2.47–8). These various journeys are non-identical, but crucially intersecting, diverging, and converging at either Cyrene or Delphi or both.

Place seems, in general, custom-made for self-conscious explorations of unity. Pindar, like other poets after him, styles the poem as a ‘journey’ (Nem. 6.54, Ol. 6.22–6, Pyth. 4.247–8, Ol. 1.110; compare Isthm. 2.2, 8.61, Bacch. 5.176–8). There are multiple ‘paths’ that can be taken (Isthm. 4.1; cf. Bacch. 5.31–3). The poem must reach its destination, but it can veer off and needs to be brought back on track (Pyth. 11.38–9). Ancient and modern critical spatial metaphors (παρέκβασις, digression, centrifugality, centripetality) are far from being the preserve just of criticism, ancient or modern. Pindar, too, avails himself abundantly, implicitly and explicitly, of such metaphors in his own engagement with ideas of unity and relevance.

Unity of time?

Epinician characteristically toggles between the ‘now’ of the encomiastic-performative present and the ‘then’ of the mythical past.Footnote ⁸³ A typical device for segueing from the former to the latter is a relative pronoun, referring to a person or a place, combined with the temporal adverb ποτέ, ‘once (upon a time)’ (Ol. 3.13, etc.).Footnote ⁸⁴ The mythical past may subsequently be further differentiated. Thus, in Olympian 7 we get various successive temporal regressions (30, 34, 55, 71),Footnote ⁸⁵ and different times are handled discombobulatingly in Pythian 4 (compare above, on place).Footnote ⁸⁶ Here, time is centrifugally handled.

There is, however, a complementary centripetal dynamic. The discreteFootnote ⁸⁷ temporal levels may be collapsed, bringing the ‘now’ into close alignment with the ‘then’. Notably, this happens when the past mythological narrative culminates in an aition for a rite whose performance continues into the present, in particular, a festival at which the ode is being performed. The best illustration of such a collapsing of temporal levels is a poem which is neither Pindaric nor epinician. Bacchylides 17 comprises the mythological narration of the ‘twice-seven’ Athenian youths who sailed with Theseus to Minos’ Knossos. This voyage was the aition for the Delia festival.Footnote ⁸⁸ Bacchylides’ poem (transmitted as a ‘dithyramb’ in the Alexandrian edition, but more easily regarded as a paean) indicates at its close that it is being performed at the Delia by a chorus of Ceans (130–2). These Cean choreuts are re-enacting in the here-and-now the ritual dances once instituted on Delos in mythical time by Theseus and the Athenian youths. The here-and-now and the there-and-then are not only aetiologically connected, they are also analogically connected: the sexually unrestrained, tribute-exacting King Minos behaves like a fifth-century bce Persian despot (in Greek depictions of them: compare Herodotus 3.80.5, 5.18–20), while Theseus, leaping to the defence of vulnerable ‘Ionians’ (3), and then leaping literally into the sea to prove Poseidon’s parentage (76–129), evokes Athens’ (self-)image in the 470s bce as protector of the Ionian islanders against Persian imperial aggression and herself as an aspiring thessalocracy.

The ease with which it can be inferred that Bacchylides 17 was performed at the Delia cannot generally be replicated for epinicians, where all we have to go on are our own (rarely ancient scholars’; but see Didymus at Σ Nem. 1.7b) inferences from the text.Footnote ⁸⁹ These are shaky enough for scholars to question whether epinicians were indeed performed at public festivals.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, Nemean 10.22–3 should suffice to defuse extreme scepticism on this score; it references the Argive Heraea as the occasion for the ode’s performance in a way that resists interpretation as a performative fiction.Footnote ⁹¹

Olympian 7.79–80 refers in detail to a festival celebrated in honour of Rhodes’ heroic founder Tlepolemus (the Tlepolemeia). This has prompted some scholars to infer that the ode was performed at that festival.Footnote ⁹² The outer ring of the ode’s three concentric mythological narratives tells of Tlepolemus’ vicissitudes of fortune (27–33, 77–8), culminating in his founding of Rhodes and the institution of his ongoing cult (79–80). If the ode were performed at the Tlepolemeia, then the mythical past would here zoom to the performative present; ‘then’ would merge into ‘now’. An analogy is also implied between Diagoras and Tlepolemus.Footnote ⁹³ The question how far to press the analogy takes us again into the treacherous territory of ‘historical allegory’ (see above). There is, in particular, the question of whether the hero cult paid to Tlepolemus has implications of similar for Diagoras.Footnote ⁹⁴ (Compare above, with Hiero in Pythian 2 and Bacchylides 3.)

Similar things may be found in odes other than Olympian 7. Isthmian 4, if performed at the Theban Heracleia (61),Footnote ⁹⁵ would see the celebration of the laudandus Melissus coincide with the cultic celebration of Heracles. Pythian 5, if performed at the Cyrenean Carneia (78–81),Footnote ⁹⁶ and if this festival incorporated the heroic cult of Battus as Cyrene’s founder (93–5), would see the celebration of Arcesilaus coincide with that of Battus. Pythian 1, if performed at the Aetnaea festival in honour of Zeus Aetnaeus (that is, Zeus worshipped at the site of the mountain he put atop the defeated Typhoeus),Footnote ⁹⁷ would see the celebration of Hiero coincide with that of Zeus; the poem parallels Hiero’s founding of Aetna and his victory in the sea battle of Cyme in an analogical relationship with Zeus’ victory over Typhoeus. Clearly, this is not generalizable to all or even a majority of epinicians. The Heraea, for instance, does not seem obviously significant for the interpretation of Nemean 10 nor the festival of Ajax Oiliades for Olympian 9.Footnote ⁹⁸ Nor are festivals even mentioned in many odes. But the pattern is observable in sufficient odes for us to assert that Pindar was interested in the treatment of time – like that of place and action – as giving him scope to co-ordinate diversifying (or centrifugal) and unifying (or centripetal) principles.

Not only have doubts sometimes been raised about whether Pindar’s odes were ever performed at public festivals, it has also been questioned whether it would much matter for the odes’ appreciation even if they were.Footnote ⁹⁹ On the contrary, we should recognize that we are dealing here with a phenomenon of considerable literary and historical importance. At issue here is the following cluster of features: the fêting of a charismatic individual at a public festival; an implied equation of the individual with the deity or hero in whose honour the festival is celebrated; an implied equation of the recent exploits of the charismatic individual with those of the deity or hero that are commemorated in the aetiological myth of the festival; and the framework of a continuous or iterated festival implying the repeatability of a single archetypical moment and the collapsibility of ‘now’ and ‘then’. Classical Greek epinician pioneered this cluster of features, but it transmitted it to subsequent poetry: notably, to Hellenistic aduentus-poetry (that is, poetry fêting the ceremonial arrival in a city of a charismatic individual). The stand-out specimen of the genre is the ‘ithyphallic hymn’ for Demetrius Poliorcetes on his arrival in Athens (circa 291 bce), coinciding with the celebration of the festival of his divine namesake, Demeter (Duris BNJ 76 F13 esp. 1–4).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Greek poetry of this genre is barely preserved.Footnote ¹⁰¹ However, Roman ‘ruler panegyric’ poetry is appreciably better preserved and perpetuates exactly the same tradition.Footnote ¹⁰² A superb example of this, which perfectly displays our feature-cluster, is to be found in Book 8 of Virgil’s Aeneid in the ecphrasis of Aeneas’ shield, climaxing with its depiction of the celebration of Octavian’s ‘triple triumph’ (Aen. 8.714–28).Footnote ¹⁰³ This triple triumph was held on 13, 14, and 15 August 29 bce.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It thus coincided (though not, of course, fortuitously) with the annual Hercules festival in Rome centred on the Ara Maxima held on 12 August.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The mythological aition of the annual Hercules festival was Hercules’ defeat of Cacus (Aen. 8.268–305).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The one-off celebration of Octavian for his recent exploits coincides with the recurring celebration of Hercules for his ancient exploits. This creates ‘a sense of identity of the “same” day, which connects the present with the distant past’, so that ‘you can travel between time zones through a version of what the space-time physicists call a wormhole’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The ‘choruses of mothers’ who gather at the temples and altars for Octavian (718) in Virgil’s description merge with the chorus of young men and of old men who do likewise to sing of the deeds of Hercules (287). Octavian’s consecration of ‘the greatest shrines’ (716) throughout the city corresponds to the establishment of the ‘greatest altar’ (271–2) to commemorate Hercules’ defeat of Cacus (Hercules’ festival was celebrated at the Ara Maxima). Octavian’s victory at Actium is also analogically related to Hercules’ victory over Cacus.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Octavian (Augustus) is implicitly equated with Hercules.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ How far to press the analogy between the (godlike?) human laudandus and the hero or god of the festival remains, as always, unclear.Footnote ¹¹⁰ There is the question of whether the deification of Hercules, and likewise the forthcoming deification of Aeneas, who is also paralleled with Hercules in this book, intimates a prospective deification of Augustus;Footnote ¹¹¹ readers will now recognize this as a recurrent question (again, see above, on both Hiero and Diagoras).

Given a choice, Classical scholars will prefer parallels for given phenomena in earlier and contemporary texts; but often parallels in later ones can be just as significant and, given the state of our evidence, they may sometimes be the best or all we can get. Roman evidence for Greek traditions (whether for a textual tradition, a literary tradition, or a particular cultural tradition), where available, is not to be sniffed at. In this instance, it both permits and requires us to recognize vital convergences and continuities within Greco-Roman poetic tradition and cultural practices: on the one hand, in poetic tradition, encompassing Classical Greek epinician, Hellenistic aduentus-poetry, Virgilian and Horatian ‘panegyric’ poetry for Augustus;Footnote ¹¹² on the other hand, in cultural practices, encompassing Classical Greek ϵἰσέλασις,Footnote ¹¹³ Hellenistic ὑπάντησις, Roman adventus/supplicatio.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Aeneid strongly resembles in its encomiastic premise a Classical Greek epinician. It has a contemporary living ‘laudandus’, Augustus, who is praised obliquely via a mythological heroic narrative involving his ancestors.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Both Greece and Rome shared a liking for Heracles-Hercules as heroic paradigm for the athletic victor or triumphator/Emperor,Footnote ¹¹⁶ and for heroized or apotheosized city-founders in this role, such as Tlepolemus for Diagoras (Ol. 7), Battus I for Arcesilas IV (Pyth. 5), Aeneas and Romulus for Augustus. Four centuries separate Pindar from Virgil. The very longevity of this jointly poetic and cultural phenomenon is a powerful indication of its importance. This long continuity more than compensates for the lack of interest in the performance contexts of Pindar’s odes in ancient scholarship. We should be under no illusions: an ode’s first performance at a civic festival really does matter. It could be fundamental to an ode’s ‘composition and functioning’,Footnote ¹¹⁷ and, in particular, to an ode’s self-exploration of its own unity.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In such collapsing or identification of temporal levels (‘wormholes’), we see the inclusion of a centripetal dynamic, in addition to the centrifugal one, in the epinician treatment of time.

Unity of voice (person deixis)?

As for some scholars it is practically an article of faith that the Pindaric ode must have unity, so it is for others that the Pindaric ode should have unitary first-person reference (though they may still disagree over where to find it).Footnote ¹¹⁹ As unitarians are pitted against anti-unitarians, so we may see ‘univocalists’ as pitted against ‘polyphonalists’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Polyphonalists are not necessarily also anti-unitarians; they do not eschew ‘internal coherence’ in favour of ‘non-coherent shifts’.Footnote ¹²¹ On the contrary, advocates of non-unitary reference in first-person statements are able to argue that shifts in the reference of the first person or in first-person deixis produce powerful poetic effects that conduce precisely to the overall coherence of the ode.

The epinician norm regarding person deixis seems to be that ‘I’ standardly refers to the poet-laudator; the laudandus, meanwhile, is standardly spoken of in the third person or addressed in the second, as are the members of the chorus (kōmos),Footnote ¹²² whose leader may also sometimes be singled out and individually named.Footnote ¹²³ However, such stability in person deixis may be undermined in various ways. One relatively unproblematic way in which this may happen is via direct speech in the mythical narrative, when ‘I’ will, of course, refer to the character who speaks. Consequently, the handling of person deixis differs somewhat in the here-and-now and the there-and-then. Medea’s exceptionally long speech in Pyth. 4 (13–56) sets up a contrasting deixis to the rest of the ode.Footnote ¹²⁴

Sometimes first-person statements made by heroic characters in direct speech in the there-and-then closely align with something that the laudandus himself might want to say in the here-and-now.Footnote ¹²⁵ Pelops’ pronouncement at Olympian 1.81–5 (‘this contest shall await me’, ἀλλ’ ἐμοὶ μὲν οὗτος ἄϵθλος | ὑποκϵίσϵται) would fit snugly in the mouth of Hiero.Footnote ¹²⁶ In Olympian 4.22–7, the Argonaut Erginus boasts: ‘this is me, in fleetness of foot’ (οὗτος ἐγὼ ταχυτᾶτι), before going on to declare that prematurely grey hairs belie a person’s true age; Erginus here surely speaks for the laudandus, Psaumis.Footnote ¹²⁷ In Bacchylides’ eleventh ode, Proetus declares to Artemis, in the event of his daughters’ healing, ‘I will sacrifice to you twenty oxen’ (104–5 θύσω δέ τοι ϵἴκοσι βοῦς); his vow approximates to something that the laudandus’ father might have said, or wanted to say, especially if the epinician celebration took place in Artemis’ Metapontine sanctuary (referenced at 116–20) and if the victory was considered Artemis’ boon.Footnote ¹²⁸ In these last two instances, narratological features invite us to relate these utterances of mythological characters in the there-and-then to the laudandus in the here-and-now. In Bacchylides’ ode, it is a sudden shift from indirect to direct speech.Footnote ¹²⁹ In Olympian 4, it is the placement of Erginus’ speech at the end of the ode, without any speech-capping formula and without the usual return to the here-and-now.Footnote ¹³⁰ In these examples, the use of first-person statements in direct speech in the there-and-then suddenly open a window onto the here-and-now. While stopping short of metalepsis proper,Footnote ¹³¹ these instances exploit a remarkable porosity between what ought to be ontologically distinct narratological levels: the there-and-then and the here-and-now (another kind of ‘wormhole’: compare above).

This point may segue into something more controversial. At Pythian 8.56–60 and 9.89–92, we have first-person utterances whose content (according to some scholars of polyphonalist persuasion, both ancient and modern) requires us to identify the speaker as the athletic victor, even in the absence of explicit speaker-attributions,Footnote ¹³² in violation of the norm that the first-person statements refer to the poet, while the victor is spoken of in the third person or addressed in the second. The phenomenon of unsignalled brief intrusions of a different first-person speaking persona can be paralleled in divers other literature, such as Ciceronian oratory or the nineteenth-century English novel.Footnote ¹³³ In Pindar, however, they seem to be used quite uniquely. These instances come at moments of ‘zooming’, transition from the past to the present via cult, moments where the boundary between there-and-then and here-and-now is at its most permeable. In each passage, a hero who has first been mentioned in the context of a mythological narrative passes into being the object of cult continuing into the present, in which capacity he has had a profound effect on the life of the laudandus in the here-and-now.Footnote ¹³⁴ Alcmeon, ‘neighbour-hero’ of the laudandus Aristomenes and capable of epiphany in the present, made a prophecy to Aristomenes of his Pythian victory as he was on his way to compete (Pyth. 8.58–60), and Aristomenes is permitted to usurp the poet-laudator’s first-person discourse to register this fact: ‘rejoicing, I myself pelt Alcmeon with garlands’ (56–7 χαίρων δὲ καὶ αὐτός | Ἀλκμᾶνα στϵϕάνοισι βάλλω). Iolaus, tutelary hero with Heracles of the Theban Heracleia-Iolaea festival, ‘honoured’ the laudandus Telesicrates with victory at that festival (Pyth. 9.79–80); Telesicrates is permitted to acknowledge this fact in the first person: ‘I celebrate with them [Heracles and Iolaus], having been done a good turn in fulfilment of a prayer’ (89–89a τοῖσι τέλϵιον ἐπ’ ϵὐχᾶι κωμάσωμαί τι παθών | ἐσλόν).

In the examples considered in the previous paragraph but one (Pelops in Ol. 1, Erginus in Ol. 4, Proetus in Bacchyl. 11), the perspective of the laudandus is obliquely incorporated in the ode via characters’ speeches in the mythological narrative. In those of the previous paragraph, the laudandus himself is permitted directly to make utterances in the first person that pertain to his situation in the here-and-now. We may recognize these as two complementary ways of bringing the laudandus out of the shadows of the third person and into the limelight of the first. We might say that we are dealing with different types of ‘wormholes’: those that take us respectively from the there-and-then to the here-and-now and those that take us from the here-and-now to the there-and-then. The fluctuating reference of first-person statements is a form of centrifugality in that it involves throwing over a fixed and stable deictic origo. But this is, crucially, done in the interests of unifying the situation of the hero in the there-and-then with that of the laudandus in the here-and-now; it can thus be said to involve a compensatory form of centripetality.

We should compare with this another related, and likewise contested, phenomenon. At Pyth. 5.72–81 (τὸ δ’ ἐμὸν… κλέος… ἐμοὶ πατέρϵς… σϵβίζομϵν) and Isthm. 4.61–3 (ἀστοὶ… αὔξομϵν) we have first-person utterances that ‘polyphonalists’ would attribute to local citizen choruses of Cyreneans and Thebans respectively,Footnote ¹³⁵ again violating the ‘rule’ that first persons are used of the poet and second or third persons of the performers. These passages come at points where the there-and-then of the mythical narration (once again) zooms to the here-and-now of ongoing ritual celebration: at the Cyrenean Carneia and Theban Heracleia respectively (see above). We may compare the famous Sophoclean choral utterance, ‘why should I dance?’ (OT 896 τί δϵῖ μϵ χορϵύϵιν;), where, according to some scholars, the identity of the performers in the here-and-now (Athenian chorus-members dancing at a festival in honour of Dionysus) is submerged with the dramatic identity of the chorus in the there-and-then (Theban Elders). Both epinician and tragedy arguably have a ‘double perspective’: a there-and-then and a here-and-now (this is in fact clearer in epinician than in tragedy), which can momentarily be conflated into one.Footnote ¹³⁶ Clearer still is the end of Bacchylides’ Poem 17 (lines 128–32), where the identity of the performers in the here-and-now is finally disclosed: they are a chorus of Ceans singing a paean (probably) for Apollo at the Delia, and their voice is temporarily submerged with that of the Athenian youths of the there-and-then, who have themselves just ‘raised a paean-cry’ at the end of the mythological narrative (129 παιάνιξαν).Footnote ¹³⁷ Once again, ongoing cult (the Delia festival) creates a ‘wormhole’ by which the speakers/performers in the here-and-now are connected with the there-and-then.

‘Polyphonalists’ can see a centrifugal approach being taken to one form of deixis (person deixis) in conjunction with a centripetal approach simultaneously being taken to others (temporal and spatial deixis). It involves a collapsing of there-and-then and here-and-now exploiting the perspective of either the athletic victor or the performers (chorus).

Grammatical and metrical unity

Having explored centrifugal and centripetal dynamics in Pindar’s treatments of deixis (place, time, and person), it will be useful to glance briefly also at Pindar’s treatment of grammar and metrical form. It will be found that here a similar balance between centrifugalism and centripetalism obtains.

Every sentence is necessarily a grammatical unity. Grammatical incompleteness is an impossibility – discounting interruptions, aposiopesis, anacoluthon, and modern nonsense compositions, such as Lewis Carroll’s ‘Humpty-Dumpty’s Recitation’ (where supposed ‘sentences’ end with conjunctions and connectives: ‘because’, ‘if’, ‘but’). Pindar’s sentences are complex unities, often with highly-involved syntax and gradually unfolding periods. Syntactical tension is created through the postponement of expected grammatical or semantic information, such as the subject of the sentence (e.g. Ol. 10.24–34). ‘The attention is often kept alive by suspense, the object being held back as if it were the answer to a riddle, and this very suspense serves to preserve the organic unity.’Footnote ¹³⁸ ‘[T]he separation helps to reinforce the organic character of Pindar’s poetry inasmuch as the centrifugal arrangement which presides over the organization of the phrase is revealed to be paradoxically centripetal.’Footnote ¹³⁹ This contrasts with the adding style that typifies Homeric composition.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ A broadly comparable effect can be achieved in the German language, where the separation of grammatically linked terms in second and final position (for instance, auxiliary verb and past participle, or modal verb and infinitive, or a verb and its separable prefix) creates a tension spanning the whole sentence: in other words, a kind of balance between centrifugalism and centripetalism.

Pindar’s handling of metrical form is likewise characterized by suspense and an ‘organic unity’, centrifugal tendencies balanced by centripetal ones. Pindar’s epinicians employ unique and complex metrical structures, which span either stanzas or triads; contrast, again, Homer’s stichic metre, which open-endedly piles verse on verse.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The indefinitely repeatable hexameter verse form itself has no inherent closure- or unity-conferring property – no sense of expectation, no point of departure (centrifugalism), no necessary point of return (centripetalism). The length of Pindar’s stanzas and the number of stanzas or triads are open, which entails suspense right from the beginning. Thereafter, every stanza-end (for monostrophic compositions) or every triad-end (for triadic compositions) provides the potential for closure (completeness, unity), a potential that will only be realized when metrical closure coincides with grammatical and thematic closure.

The grammatical, metrical, and thematic structures of an epinician constitute three different kinds of independent self-contained ‘organic’ unities that are crucially offset with one another. ‘Pindar … does not insist on the grammatical structure coinciding with the metrical’; ‘Pindar made his syntactical units run counter to his metrical, presumably because he saw the poem as a whole and did not wish it to fall into separate and easily distinguishable sections.’Footnote ¹⁴² Sophocles has comparably been observed to have a predilection for having his syntactical units misaligned with the metrical, with trimeter lines ending on conjunctions and connectives (ἐπϵί, ὅτι, ἀτάρ).Footnote ¹⁴³ (Compare and contrast Humpty-Dumpty, above.) Similar offsetting is observable with Pindar’s disposition of the thematic subject matter of epinician (victory data, poet’s task, gnōmai, myth, etc.) across the metrical form. ‘The ode … has two structures. There is the formal, triadic design of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, upon which the actual content of the poem is laid or against which it is counterpointed.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ ‘Once indeed [sc. in Nem. 10]Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Pindar makes each triad contain a separable and separate share of his main contents … Otherwise his invariable method is to pursue his theme without respect for the metrical structure, or rather to take advantage of it for small surprises and changes of direction.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ For the effects achieved, we may compare the interplay of word-accent and metrical beat (ictus) in the Virgilian hexameter. These are two different but complementary principles, the former inherent in the Latin language itself, the latter conferred by the hexameter form. Typically, the two principles are aligned at the start and end of the line, misaligned in the middle (Aen. 1.1 árma uirúmque cáno, Troíae quí prímus ab óris): this may be compared with the offsetting of metrical, grammatical, and thematic structures in the majority of Pindar’s epinicians. Rarely, the beat aligns with the accent in every foot (Ecl. 1.70 ímpius haéc tám cúlta nouália míles habébit): this may be compared with the unusual and striking effect created by Nem. 10.

What needs to be emphasized here is the interplay of different elements, which come in and out of alignment. We may speak of ‘counterpointing’ in the formal organization of Pindaric odes, as we arguably can in the treatment of action, place, time, and speaking voice (i.e. person deixis).