Alessio Ranno2024, "Corinth-Syracuse. Current research and perspectives", 5-6 July 2024; Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
In this paper I provide further exploration of Pindar’s poetic production for the city of Corinth, with close attention to the interpretative potential offered by the nuanced relationship established by Pindaric lyric with Corinthian topography and materiality. Specifically, I focus my analysis on the epinician ode Olympian 13 and the sympotic poem (skolion) fr. 122 S.-M., both composed in 464 BC to celebrate the double Olympic victory achieved by the Corinthian athlete Xenophon. On methodological terms, my analysis seeks to establish a balanced mediation between traditional historicist readings of visual and material culture in lyric poetry, and a set of up-to-date theoretical approaches that propose to unravel the creative employment of visuality and materiality, as means for prompting reflection on matters of poetic communication and literary reception. On the one hand, rather than treating poetic texts as mainly a piece of historical-archaeological evidence, I show how material culture and archaeology may serve as a valuable comparandum for framing discourse on poetic communication and its aesthetic, evocative, and commemorative potential. On the other hand, however, I intend to show how not only the use of visuality and materiality in general, but also the specificity of Corinthian civic monuments, iconographies, and geographical spots, potentially offers deeper insight into matters of poetic communication and meaning in the analyzed Pindaric texts. Additionally, I aim to show how intermediality, and the negotiations between song and space, may contribute to emphasizing, and actively shaping, the intertextual connections established between Pindar’s Corinthian poems on the one hand, and between Pindar and earlier poetry for Corinth on the other (in this case, Simonides' poetry for the city).