Most Poet and Public.pdf

Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      part iii Critical approaches to the victory ode Rhetoric, imagery, and narrative  January ,  : Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      January ,  : c ha pt e r 1 2 Poet and public Communicative strategies in Pindar and Bacchylides Glenn W. Most Richardo Kannicht magistro necnon amico quinque et sexaginta annos nato dedicatum olim nunc dedicandum fere octogenario Untilsomewhat over a hundred years ago, Classicists did not know very much more about Bacchylides than what the author of the ancient treatise On the Sublime (.) had said about him: t© d”; –n m”lesi mllon ‹n e²nai Bakcul©dhv ™loio £ P©ndarov, kaª –n tragd© ï Iwn ¾ C±ov £ nŸ D©a Sojoklv; –peidŸ o¬ m•n ˆdi†ptwtoi kaª –n t glajur p†nth kekalligrajhm”noi, ¾ d• P©ndarov kaª ¾ Sojoklv ¾t• m•n o³on p†nta –pijl”gousi t¦‚ jor, sb”nnuntai dì ˆl»gwv poll†kiv kaª p©ptousin ˆtuc”stata. § oÉdeªv ‹n eÔ jronän —n¼v dr†matov, toÓ O«d©podov, e«v taÉt¼ sunqeªv t‡ ï Iwnov <p†ntì> ˆntitimžsaito —xv. Or take lyric poetry: would you choose to be Bacchylides rather than Pindar? Or in tragedy Ion of Chios rather than Sophocles? Certainly Bacchylides and Ion never put a foot wrong and in all their works show themselves masters of beautiful writing in the smooth style, whereas the other two sometimes set the world ablaze in their violent onrush, but often have their flame quenched for no reason and collapse miserably. Surely no one in his right mind would rate all the works of Ion put together as highly as one single play, the Oedipus.  The earliest version of this article was delivered as a lecture at a conference at Tübingen University during the Winter Semester / in honour of the retirement of Professor Richard Kannicht. Thereafter it was presented orally in various countries over the course of a number of years and also circulated in written form, sometimes with surprising consequences (e.g. Pfeijffer and Slings : ff.). Over the course of many years, the form of the article has gradually been refined and improved, and the bibliography has been updated to take account of new research; but the substance of the argument and its conclusions have remained intact. A small portion of the original lecture was published in revised form as Most : –. My thanks to the various audiences and to many friends for their helpful criticisms and suggestions. Trans. Campbell : .  Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most With an unerring eye for the social and psychological realities of the ancient classroom, Pseudo-Longinus divides literature up into various genres, and within each one plays off a single central school author, to his advantage, against one or more marginal or non-canonical writers: in poetry written in dactylic hexameters, Homer against Apollonius Rhodius and Theocritus; in elegy, Archilochus against Eratosthenes; in lyric, Pindar against Bacchylides; in tragedy, Sophocles against Ion of Chios; in eloquence, Demosthenes against Hyperides. The difference between the better author and the worse is deemed to be so self-evident that no argument is required in order to demonstrate it – the mere names are enough. In many cases (but not in all) the better author is Archaic and the worse Hellenistic, in most cases (though again not in all) the better author is at least somewhat more ancient than the worse one – the only thing all the pairs have in common without exception is a comparative judgement of quality that is taken to be manifest and natural. Each pitiless synkrisis presupposes that the goals every pair of authors pursued were identical but that the results they attained must for that very reason have been entirely different: Pseudo-Longinus presumes, as something that his readers will not imagine disputing, that every author, like every human being, desires to be great, but that in every category of possible achievement only one candidate can be the very best of all. A deep ideological connection obviously links this axiological comparison of winners and losers with the general ambient culture of competition and desire for superiority, trained, directed and impelled by the dynamics of the classroom – then as now. And since it was the ancient school authors who stood the best chance of temporarily escaping oblivion’s omnivorous maw, given that it was copies of their works that circulated most widely, the judgement of history gave every appearance of confirming PseudoLonginus’ taste: for until the nineteenth century, all the victors in his sublime competition were relatively well represented by surviving works (with only one exception, Archilochus), while only two of the losers, i.e. the runners-up (Apollonius Rhodius and Theocritus), were extant in more than scattered fragments. But already by the middle of the nineteenth century Hyperides had begun to be resurrected from papyri. In  a papyrus roll was discovered,   The technique of synkrisis has naturally, been most studied with regard to Plutarch. See e.g. Hense ; Leo : –; Focke ; Erbse ; Larmour ; Swain ; Pelling b. ‘The whole trick of pedagogic reason lies precisely in the way it extorts the essential while seeming to demand the insignificant’ (Bourdieu : –). The study of such mechanisms is a central focus of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education; see in general Bourdieu and Passeron  and . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  and in the following year published (Kenyon ), in which Bacchylides was finally restored to something like his original form. For the first time since many centuries, scholars were thereby put into a position in which they could revise their hearsay acceptance of Pseudo-Longinus’ judgement by appeal to their own examination of the textual evidence. But new information, in itself, never produces scholarly progress: humans are lazy, and it takes far less effort to confirm old prejudices than to revise them. Had Bacchylides’ millennial silence been a deplorable loss after all? Might what had been submerged turn out to have been no less valuable in its own way than what had been rescued? Might the court of world history have erred? These are unsettling questions: and barely two weeks after the editio princeps of Bacchylides had been published, Wilamowitz had already seized his pen and calmed an anxious world: For the fame of Bacchylides it would have been advantageous if he had already appeared in . He would have stridden with the full aura of classical exemplarity through the centuries that have gradually worked their way up from the imitation of these models to the freedom of authentic art. He is the perfect master of an entirely smooth form; easily understandable and rather shallow thoughts look stately enough in the opulent adornment of his style. That would have been appropriate both for the courtly pomp of the time of Louis XIV and for the elegance of the age of reason. Now we demand more from poetry and especially from the poet; it need not be feared that even a classically minded lover might wish to hear from the lips of his beloved a song by the nightingale of Ceos, now that he can know how it sang. Much likelier is the danger that the philologists, annoyed at the disappointment of their hopes, might make poor Bacchylides pay for the fact that they were looking in him for a great poet – who never showed up. The forceful but wavering late Romantic tastes, the self-congratulatory tone, and the manifold denigration of Bacchylides that mark this passage are indeed rather extreme, even for Wilamowitz; but its content is in fact far from atypical. Judgements like this were not uncommon at least until the s. Scholars did not often say that Bacchylides was entirely worthless, but they did tend to find him second-rate – and always in explicit or implicit comparison to Pindar: as it were, the scholar’s own high quality was confirmed by his expressly stated preference for a first-rate poet. It is only since the s that (at first mostly American) scholars like Kirkwood, Stern, Lefkowitz, Segal and Burnett have begun to identify Bacchylides’    Wilamowitz : –. Kenyon . See in general Stern . Early exceptions to this general trend include Zanghieri : – and Gentili . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most individual qualities and to value them in their own right and not merely as a foil for Pindar’s greatness; and this more positive tendency has recently been reinforced by the upsurge in Bacchylidean studies associated with the centenary of the discovery of the London papyrus, and by monographs published in the past several years. Bacchylides’ delight in narrative, his sense for dramatic tension, the lively colours of his epithets, his surprisingly subtle use of gnomai and the rapid lightness of his tempos are by now familiar terms in the scholarly discussion of his poetry. But it remains less clear whether these features of his poetry simply correspond to character traits of the poet, or whether they might also serve some specifiable rhetorical or literary function within the ceremonial occasion of the poems’ performance. For there is no reason to believe that Bacchylides’ poems were linked any less profoundly to the social circumstances of poetic production and reception than were all the other products of the archaic Greek poets. Since Bundy (), few indeed are the Classicists who would dare to suggest that any passage in a Pindaric poem had simply arisen from no other motive than the poet’s individual and arbitrary caprice; and although it cannot be doubted that Bundy went too far in his own one-sided approach, at least he is principally responsible for the sensible current scholarly consensus that all the elements of a Pindaric poem – whatever other meanings they might additionally have – must also fulfil a specifiable function within the situation of the poetic commission. What about Bacchylides? Did he narrate stories so vividly simply because he enjoyed doing so? Did he use more colourful epithets than Pindar merely because he happened to possess a more lively sensitivity to visual appearances? Trying to answer such questions means investigating the function of the features of Pindar’s and Bacchylides’ poetry within the context of the ceremonial occasions for which they were commissioned and in which they were performed. Astonishingly, one obvious way to try to do this has scarcely ever been tried hitherto: namely, to compare with one another poems which Pindar and Bacchylides composed to be sung on the very same occasion. For assessing the similarities and differences between two different poetic answers to exactly the same situational exigencies should help us to understand better the specificities of the two poets’ approaches, i.e. the way they understood themselves individually as poets working within the same poetic genre and tried to come to terms, each in his own    Kirkwood ; Stern , ; Lefkowitz , ; Segal ; Burnett .  Stenger ; Fearn . Pfeijffer and Slings ; Bagordo and Zimmermann . See e.g. Kriegler ; Segal ; Stenger ; Fearn . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  way, with the constraints of a given situation. What is more, it is hard to imagine that either poet did not know that the other had also been commissioned to compose a poem for the very same celebration in which his own ode would be performed: hence both poets must have known that their audience would have an opportunity to compare the two poems, and we can surely suppose that each poet designed his poem not only so as to celebrate the victor but also in order to demonstrate to everyone – the victor, the audience, above all the other poet – that his own mode of celebration was the better one. In other words, each poet will have intended his poem not only as a celebration of the victor but also as a programmatic display of his own poetic practice in contrast with his competitor’s. As it happens, in three cases poems are in fact transmitted which Pindar and Bacchylides composed in honour of the very same victor for the very same athletic victory. One sometimes hears it said that all the interesting questions in Classics have already been asked and answered; but the fact that, as far as I know, in the  years since the publication of the Bacchylides papyrus only one of these pairs of poems has ever been compared extensively, and that only once, suggests that much of the groundwork still remains to be done. I shall leave out of account here Bacchylides’ short fourth poem and Pindar’s splendid Pythian , since they were indeed composed in honour of the same victory, that of Hieron in the horse race at Delphi in  bc, but were almost certainly intended to be performed at two different celebrations, Bacchylides’ in Delphi and Pindar’s in Aetna; if so, then the circumstances of performance may well have been so different that we can not safely draw conclusions from any differences between the two poems to differences between the two poets’ approaches. Let us instead consider the two pairs of poems that not only were composed to honour the very same victories but also were designed to be sung on the very same occasions. These two pairs of poems are Bacchylides  and Pindar’s Nemean , both composed in perhaps  or  bc for the victory of Pytheas of Aegina in    So e.g. Calder . But even serious scholars have sometimes fallen victim to similar misconceptions: it is said that during his last years Wilamowitz expressed sympathy for his younger students, as all of the important problems in the field had either already been solved by his predecessors, his colleagues and himself, or would be soon, by students currently doing research. Lefkowitz : – examines Bacch.  and Ol.  and compares them with one another. Wilamowitz : – briefly compares Nem.  and Bacch. , much to the latter’s disadvantage; Jebb :  also provides a summary comparison between these two poems and at – compares Pindar’s and Bacchylides’ attitudes towards Hieron; Fearn : – makes a few comments on Pindar’s Nem.  in the course of his interpretation of Bacch. . Severyns : –; Maehler : ii –; Irigoin et al. : . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most boys’ pankration at Nemea, and Bacchylides  and Pindar’s Olympian , both in celebration of the victory of Hieron of Syracuse in the horse race at the Olympic games of  bc. I shall discuss the former two poems first, since they were not only composed earlier, but are also much simpler than the latter two. The preliminary results obtained with this first comparison can then be checked in a briefer treatment of the second pair of poems. In Bacchylides , the first triad is missing except for the name of the Muse Clio in verse , as is the second strophe except for the last two verses. The text extant on the papyrus begins with the speech of a goddess who vividly describes Heracles strangling the Nemean lion, and prophesies that one day the Greeks will perform contests in the pankration at this very place (–). The poet then goes on to make clear that her prophecy has been fulfilled: for even today, he asserts, athletic victors are crowned in Nemea – Pytheas, for example, who now returns victorious from the games to his home town of Aegina (–). There Aegina, the eponymous nymph, is celebrated by choruses of maidens who praise in song her strong sons, the warlike Aeacids (–). From among these the poet selects the two most famous warriors, Achilles and Ajax, and proves their heroism by recounting for  verses the attack of the Trojans, led by Hector, upon the Achaean ships in the absence of Achilles and the successful defence by Ajax (–). Even today, he says, the fame of these dead heroes’ valour confers splendour upon Aegina and, together with Eucleia (‘Renown’) and Eunomia (‘Lawfulness’), guarantees the city’s continuing prosperity and happiness (–). And now these virtues have been climactically manifested in Pytheas’ victory: the chorus of youths who sing this song summons all well-meaning listeners to celebrate the victor and his trainer without envy (–). Then the poet concludes by expressing his gratitude for the hospitality afforded him by the victor’s father and his hope that the Muse Clio will help his poem to give pleasure to the whole city (–).     The exact date of these two poems is controversial; for the variety of scholarly positions see e.g. Jebb : –, Severyns : –, Maehler : ii –, Pfeijffer , Fearn : –. For the dating, see Jebb : –, Maehler : ii –. Severyns :  n. hypothesises that Hieron commissioned both poems; Irigoin et al. :  suggest instead that Hieron only commissioned Pindar to write the official epinician but that Bacchylides sent his poem on his own as an homage and gift. We do not know; and for the purposes of my argument it does not matter. All references to Bacchylides’ text are to Maehler ; the translation cited is Campbell . On this poem, see, besides the commentaries by Jebb : – and Maehler : ii –, at least Blass , Burnett : –, Fearn : – and Sevieri : –. Because of damage to the papyrus, the identity of the goddess is unclear. Athena is supported by, inter alios, Jebb :  and Burnett :  n., the local nymph Nemea by Wilamowitz :  n.; Maehler : ii  leaves the question undecided. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  The remarkably simple arrangement of the poem in a five-part ring composition – (a) situation of performance, (b) myth of Heracles, (c) praise of Aegina, (b′ ) myth of the Aeacids, (a′ ) situation of performance – serves to clarify the relation between mythic past and ceremonial present. An Aeginetan athlete has won a Nemean victory: Bacchylides splits this single event into two parts and distributes them to two different myths, one telling of the origin of the Nemean games (which could have been applied to a Nemean victor from any city) and another celebrating the legendary past of Aegina (which could have been applied to an Aeginetan victor at any games). The action of the first myth – a wrestling victory by the great Heracles, the mythic paradigm for Pytheas’ current victory in the pankration – is not narrated epically in the third person, but is instead placed dramatically in the mouth of a goddess who reports the event as an eyewitness and thereby makes it more vivid and lively. At the same time this dramatic mode of presentation, a goddess’ admiring report, is itself a mythical paradigm for the performance of this very ode: for this poem too reports a freshly achieved athletic victory and expresses hope for the glorious future of the young victor, while the womanliness of the mythical divine speaker is repeated now both on the divine level in the Muse Clio, who presumably was said to have inspired this poem (), and on the human one in the choruses of maidens who praise Aegina (–). Thus Bacchylides constructs two temporal lines of development running in opposite directions, the goddess’ prediction of the Greeks’ future athletic victories in Nemea on the one hand and the poem’s retrospective of Pytheas’ recent victory in Nemea on the other, and these intersect in the unique moment of the recent athletic victory, in which god and man, legend and reality, past and present, Nemea and Aegina, Heracles and Pytheas meet. Even more artful is the myth of the Aeacids, which is attached typically by a simple relative pronoun to the names of Peleus and Telamon (tän, ). It has long been recognised that by recounting how the Trojan attack upon the Greek ships was averted, Bacchylides praises both Achilles, who by his very absence provided the indispensable prerequisite for the enemy attack, and Ajax, who alone was capable of warding off Hector’s assault. The story is well known from Book  of the Iliad, and the commentators have not neglected to emphasise that this part of the poem – besides its many features typical of choral lyric – has also received secondarily a conspicuous epic colouring: the length and unhurried pace of the narrative style,   On this feature, typical of epinicians and generically linked with hymns, see Des Places : –, Hummel : §– and Pfeijffer a: –. Burnett : –. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most combined with the high tension of the events, are inevitably reminiscent of Homer. Moreover, linguistically this section also displays even more Homerisms than is usual for Bacchylides’ style, notoriously receptive to features of epic style: besides genuine epic epithets (like tacÅn specifically for Achilles (), eÉeid”ov for a woman (), or qrasuk†rdion () ) and newly invented but seemingly epic epithets (like sakesj»ron () or laoj»non () ), the passage is also remarkable for various epic usages (like ãste in the sense of ãv in similes (), the particle combination d” te (), perhaps also the epic form of the dative plural klis©hisin, which is transmitted in this form in the papyrus but has often, and no doubt erroneously, been emended to klis©aisin (), or the aorist form ³xon () ), which give this section a particularly epic character. Indeed, in one passage Bacchylides apparently goes so far as to provide what seems, for all intents and purposes, to be nothing less than a direct verbal citation of the Homeric text: for –nariz[o]m. [”n]wn/ [d’ ›[r]euqe jÛtwn/ [a¯ma]ti ga±a m”la[ina (–) compare Iliad . ç”e dì a¯mati ga±a m”laina. How are we to interpret all these patent borrowings and reminiscences? Must we conclude that Bacchylides was so uninventive that he had to filch clever turns of phrase from another, greater poet? Is a mediocre nightingale from Ceos trying to deck itself out in borrowed feathers? No doubt it was features like these that pointed some earlier scholars in this direction – yet theirs is not the only possible interpretation, nor even the most cogent one, and the evidence that this is so is supplied by another passage nearby in this same poem, in which Bacchylides’ proximity to the Homeric model is likewise unmistakable. For what stylistic feature is more instantly reminiscent of epic than an epic simile is? And it is an especially extended simile that Bacchylides deploys here in order to illustrate the sudden hopes the Trojans feel when they remark Achilles’ absence (–): epode 4, line 1 ˆllì  te dŸ pol”moi[o lxen «ostej†no[u Nhridov ˆtr»mhto[v u¬»v, ãstì –n kuananq”· q[um¼n ˆn”rwn        Jebb : ; Maehler : ii –; Fearn : –. tacÅv for Achilles only Il. . (but cf. also p»dav tacÅv); otherwise the adjective is applied mostly to the two Ajaxes.  Maehler : ii  ad loc.  Maehler : ii  ad loc. Maehler : ii  ad loc.  Jebb :  ad loc.  Jebb :  ad loc. Maehler : ii  ad loc. Maehler : ii  supports Smyth’s emendation and prints it at Maehler : ; Irigoin et al. :  print the reading of the papyrus.  Noted by Maehler : ii  ad loc.; Fearn : . Jebb :  ad loc. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      January ,  : Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides  p»ntwi Bor”av Ëp¼ kÅmasin da·zei, nukt¼v ˆnt†sav ˆnate. [llom”nav lxen d• sÆn jaesim[br»twi %o±, st»resen d” te p»nton oÉr©aá N»tou d• k»lp. [wsan pnoi ¬st©on ‰rpal”wv <tì> Šelpton –x©. [k]onto c”. [rsoná  strophe 5, line 1 âv Träev, –p. [eª] klÅon [a«cmat‡n ìAcill”a m©mno[ntì] –n klis©hisin e¯n. ek[e]n. xanqv gunaik»v, B]r. [i]s. h¹dov ¬merogu©ou, qeo±sin. Š[nteinan c”rav, joib‡n –sid»ntev Ëpaª ceimänov a­glaná    but when the fearless son of the violet-crowned Nereid ceased from the fight, – as on a dark-blossoming sea Boreas rends men’s hearts with the billows, coming face to face with them as night rises up, but ceases on the arrival of Dawn who gives light to mortals, and a gentle breeze levels the sea, and they belly out their sail before the south wind’s breath and eagerly reach the dry land which they had despaired of seeing again; so when the Trojans heard that the spearman Achilles was remaining in his tent on account of the blonde woman, lovely-limbed Briseis, they stretched up their hands to the gods, since they saw the bright gleam under the stormcloud. There are, to be sure, many sea and storm similes in Homer, but there can be little doubt that where Bacchylides found the inspiration for this passage was one particular simile in this same Book  of the Iliad in which Homer illustrates how the Greeks stoutly resisted the attacking Trojans until Hector fell upon them (Il. .–): –n dì ›pesì Þv Âte kÓma qo¦‚ –n nh¹ p”sh‚si l†bron Ëpaª nej”wn ˆnemotrej”vá ¥ d” te psa Šcnh‚ ËpekrÅjqh, ˆn”moio d• dein¼v ˆžth ¬st© –mbr”metai, trom”ousi d” te jr”na naÓtai deidi»tevá tutq¼n g‡r Ëpì –k qan†toio j”rontaiá âv –da¹zeto qum¼v –nª stžqessin %caiän. and descended upon them as descends on a fast ship the battering wave storm-bred from beneath the clouds, and the ship goes utterly hidden under the foam, and  Fränkel : –.  So too Maehler : ii ; Fearn : –. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most the dangerous blast of the hurricane thunders against the sail, and the hearts of the seamen are shaken with fear, as they are carried only a little way out of death’s reach. So the heart in the breast of each Achaian was troubled. The intertextual link could scarcely be stronger: the two passages share much of the same language and apply the same maritime situation (narrow escape from a storm at sea) by analogy to the same military one (narrow escape from disaster on the battlefield); what is more, the Homeric simile is located in the very same book, less than a hundred lines earlier, as is the line about the black earth running with blood (Il. .) which Bacchylides will go on to allude to only a few lines later (.–). And yet, despite the evident similarity between the two similes, closer inspection reveals that, with astonishing subtlety, Bacchylides has in fact completely revised his model. For Homer applies the simile to the Greeks and uses it to illustrate their panic fear at the attack on them by the Trojan hero; whereas Bacchylides applies the very same simile to the Trojans and uses it to illustrate their relief at the withdrawal from combat of the Greek hero. But not only are the persons exchanged; the mood is reversed too. After all, the Homeric simile has a slight inconcinnity, inasmuch as it is supposed to illustrate dread but concludes with a rescue: evidently Homer wants to emphasise that the Greeks were indeed in mortal danger, but cannot or will not quite suppress his knowledge, and a consolatory hint to us, that in the end they would be rescued. By alluding delicately to the eventual Greek victory, this simile of terror becomes less terrifying. Bacchylides, on the other hand, takes the relief, which in Homer was only a secondary connotation of the simile implicitly modifying its primary signification of dread, and converts it into the primary meaning of the simile. Bacchylides turns a simile of terror which implied relief into a simile of relief – yet one which, for the listener familiar with the Homeric story, subtly but unmistakably also implies eventual terror. For no sooner are we reminded of this passage in the Iliad than we recognise that the Trojans’ relief is illusory, for the Greeks will go on to win the war and the ultimate relief will therefore belong to them and not to the Trojans. And in fact in the Iliad these events take place precisely at the critical juncture just before Achilles’ decisive return to battle and they are what causally motivate that return: for it is the Trojans’ very success in their attack on the Greek ships at the end of Book  that will cause Achilles to send his friend Patroclus in his own armour into the battle at the beginning of  Trans. Lattimore : .  Noted by Maehler : ii .  Cf. Janko :  ad loc. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  Book ; then Patroclus’ death at Hector’s hands will bring Achilles into combat once more; and Hector’s death at Achilles’ hands will remove one of the last remaining obstacles to the destruction of Troy. Viewed from an omniscient perspective, the temporary success of the Trojans is revealed to be only one link in a strict causal series of events that will lead inexorably to their annihilation. So we know that what this Trojan success actually achieves is that it brings the final destruction of Troy nearer – as indeed Bacchylides will go on to say explicitly a little later (–). But the Trojans themselves did not have the advantage of being able to read the Iliad as we can; so they do not know this. Hence they are in a position of dramatic irony: they do not know something which is essential for their welfare and which we know, and so they make an erroneous judgement because they lack knowledge about circumstances of vital importance for themselves, ones about which we know exactly. In order to achieve this effect, Bacchylides must presuppose not only Homer’s narrative, but also and above all his listeners’ familiarity with Homer’s narrative, for otherwise he will not be able to construct the discrepancy in information between what his listeners know and what his characters know which is indispensable for dramatic irony. That is why Bacchylides chooses not only to make use of Homer’s text but also to signal so unmistakably that he is doing so – not because he lacked originality, but because he recognised that he was obliged to activate his listeners’ latent familiarity with the general thrust and even with some prominent details of the Homeric account if he was to achieve the specific literary effect he seems to have been seeking. Pindar’s Nemean , composed for the same victory of Pytheas, displays at first glance an even simpler basic structure than Bacchylides , for here the ring composition encompasses not five parts, but only three: (a) an introductory announcement of the victory, naming the victor, his father Lampon, the location of the athletic competition, the discipline and the home town (–), is followed by (b) a single extended myth of Peleus (–), which is concluded by (a′ ) praise for the victor, but above all for Euthymenes and Themistius, his maternal uncle and grandfather, who seem to have been extraordinarily successful athletes (–). Might the curious fact that Pindar barely mentions Pytheas’ father and emphasises instead his maternal relatives, while Bacchylides assigns far greater prominence to the father and entirely suppresses the uncle and grandfather be due to Bacchylides’ poem  The translation cited is Race . On this poem, see, besides the commentaries of Bury : – and Pfeijffer a: –, at least Gärtner  and Burnett : –. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most having been commissioned and paid for by the father, and Pindar’s by the mother’s side of the family? How happy the marital relationship between Pytheas’ parents was, we can only conjecture; but however the double commission is to be explained, it provide us a rare opportunity to compare with one another two completely different answers to precisely the same situational constraints. For detailed comparison immediately reveals that the quite simple fundamental structure of Pindar’s poem stands in stark contrast to an extraordinarily complex surface rich in sudden changes of direction, feints and surprises. Here as so often, complexity at one level tends to counterbalance simplicity at another. For example, already Pindar’s very first words, OÉk ˆndriantopoi»v e«m[i] (‘I am not a statue-maker’), can easily mislead the unwary listener, for not only do they define the poet rather than his object, the joyous message of victory, but they also tell us about the poet what he is not, a sculptor, and not what he is, a poet whose songs, we will soon learn, circulate throughout the whole world. Through a surprising sideentrance, Pindar slips into the splendid edifice of his poem: by the time we have quite understood what is happening, the triumphant celebration is already well under way. Even more confusing is the enumeration of the various catalogues of victories in the final part of the poem: it is no longer possible to determine with certainty just how many contests Pytheas won, and where, and how many his uncle, and where. Perhaps, indeed, precisely this was Pindar’s intention: he may have attached less importance to furnishing a precise arithmetical calculation than to conveying a vague but spectacular impression of an overwhelming profusion of athletic success within this prodigiously talented family.  But such complexities pale before those that mark Pindar’s telling of the myth in this poem. The beginning of the mythic narrative in verse  – Telamon, Peleus and Phocus pray to Zeus for the future prosperity of Aegina – is linked directly to the preceding sentences, which celebrate the city’s fame, now confirmed and further increased by Pytheas’ new victory: evidently Zeus fulfilled their prayer. But then come omissions, sudden transitions, and expressions of piety in bewildering profusion. Perhaps, to get a grasp on Pindar’s slippery myth, it is best to apply to it a distinction introduced by the Russian Formalists, between the fabula, the raw material underlying a narrative, consisting of a diachronic series of events linked   Cf. Gärtner : . Severyns : – suggests that the commission for the victory celebration was awarded to Pindar and that Bacchylides offered his poem for free. The exact details are unrecoverable and, for my argument here, indifferent. On the vagaries of epinician arithmetic, see in general Cole  (esp. p.  on Nem. .–). Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  causally with one another, and the sujet, the final product derived from the artistic elaboration of this raw material and proposed to the recipient. On the basis of the mythic sujet as found in Nemean , one can reconstruct the following fabula in five steps:  Telamon, Peleus and Phocus pray to Zeus.  Telamon and Peleus murder Phocus and are exiled, whereby Peleus comes to Acastus, the king of the Magnesians.  Hippolyta, Acastus’ wife, tries in vain to seduce Peleus, but he rejects her out of reverence for Zeus Xenious, so she slanders him.  Zeus rewards Peleus by marrying him to Thetis.  At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the Muses sing the stories of Peleus and Hippolyta (= ) and of Peleus and Thetis (= ). Pindar begins simply enough: in verses – he presents the first step of the fabula as the first step of the sujet. But immediately after this scene of pious prayer by the three heroes to Zeus Hellenius, Pindar unexpectedly interrupts the narrative (Nem. .–): epode 1, line 2 a«d”omai m”ga e«pe±n –n d©k te mŸ kekinduneum”non, päv dŸ l©pon eÉkl”a nson, kaª t©v Šndrav ˆlk©mouv da©mwn ˆpì O«nÛnav ›lasen. st†somaiá oÎ toi Œpasa kerd©wn ja©noisa pr»swpon ˆl†qe« ˆtrek”vá kaª t¼ sign poll†kiv –stª sojÛtaton ˆnqrÛp nosai. strophe 2, line 1 e« dì Àlbon £ ceirän b©an £ sidar©tan –painsai p»lemon ded»khtai, makr† moi aÉt»qen Œlmaqì Ëposk†ptoi tivá ›cw gon†twn ¾rm‡n –lajr†ná kaª p”ran p»ntoio p†llontì a«eto©. I shrink from telling of a mighty deed, one ventured not in accord with justice, how in fact they left the glorious island and what fortune drove the brave men from Oinona. I will halt, for not every truth is better for showing its exact face, and silence is often the wisest thing for a man to observe.  See for example Lemon and Reis : , –, . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most But if it is decided to praise happiness, strength of hands, or steel-clad war, let someone dig for me a jumping pit far from this point, for I have a light spring in my knees, and eagles leap even beyond the sea. What Pindar has left unsaid we learn from other sources: the two sons of Aeacus murdered their half-brother Phocus, and were exiled from Aegina. Peleus arrived at Acastus’ palace – i.e. the whole of step . If we did not know something about these legendary events from scholia, fragments, and later narratives, we would never be able to reconstruct them from Pindar’s words alone, so thoroughly has he left them unsaid. But ‘leaving them unsaid’ is perhaps the wrong expression: for Pindar not only suppresses them, he also explicitly asserts that he is suppressing them. He leaves them unsaid – and at the same time he cries loudly, ‘I am leaving them unsaid.’ Then he really does swoop in his narrative like an eagle over the sea: when he resumes the myth he is no longer in Aegina but in Pelium, where the chorus of Muses is singing at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis (–: step  of the fabula). And Pindar reports the content of their song: they sing of Hippolyta’s unsuccessful seduction of Peleus (–: step ) and then of Zeus’ recompensing Peleus for his piety by giving him Thetis (–: step ). In this way the five acts which occur in the reconstructable fabula in the sequence –––– are thoroughly transposed in the attested sujet: Pindar begins with , after which he leaves  loudly unsaid, then comes , and only then  and finally . At first sight, this seems a rather odd procedure. By applying the concepts of sujet and fabula we may well have succeeded in formalising the incongruities of Pindar’s narrative, but we have certainly not even begun to explain them. To do this, we must take another step, asking just what it is that Pindar has achieved, and presumably wanted to achieve, by means of these artful transpositions. As is often the case, it is helpful to flay the poem by starting not at its head, but at its tail. Pindar’s choice to anticipate the song of the Muses (step ) from the end to the middle has resulted in lending it special prominence: at the very centre of the mythic narrative, the chorus of the Muses supplies a legendary paradigm for the current human chorus, which once again is singing of a successful and pious Aeginetan. And the fact that the chorus sings of Peleus’ temptation, resistance and reward reveals the wedding of Peleus and Thetis (step ) as the appropriate reward for the hero’s moral integrity and his compliance with religious sanctions. The parallel with Pytheas and his family is obvious: after all, Pindar praises the victor’s country precisely for its hospitality, as j©lan  See in general Zunker . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  x”nwn Šrouran, ‘a land welcoming to foreigners’ (), and he presents this song to the victor as a well-earned reward for the effort to attain excellence which distinguishes him and his whole city – –slo±si m†rnatai p”ri psa p»liv, ‘the entire city strives for noble prizes’ (). Now we can understand better why Pindar might have chosen to begin with the scene of prayer (step ), for doing so allowed him to emphasise Peleus’ piety towards Zeus from the very beginning and to inscribe it firmly within the moral history of Aegina. But his doing so, of course, created a problem. For why was the Aeginetan hero Peleus staying in the palace of the Magnesian king Acastus? It may be presumed that every Aeginetan knew the reason, namely that Peleus and Telamon had murdered their half-brother Phocus: the story was told in the early epic Alcmeonis (F: p.  Bernabé; p. Davies), and Phocus’ grave lay right next to the Aeaceum, where Pausanias still seems to have seen it (..). Without Peleus’ impious fratricide, he could not journey to Magnesia; but without the journey to Magnesia, he had no opportunity to display his divinely rewarded piety. What was Pindar to do? Simply to omit the episode of the murder was presumably precluded by its notoriety. To narrate it in such a way that it could demonstrate Peleus’ piety evidently exceeded even Pindar’s inventiveness. To narrate it in such a way that it could demonstrate a gradual development in Peleus’ character from reckless youth to pious maturity corresponds more to modern ideas about personal identity than to archaic Greek ones. So Pindar came up with the idea of alluding unmistakably to this episode and simultaneously refusing to narrate it as being unacceptable for healthy religious sentiment. He does not try to conceal the fate of Phocus. On the contrary: in the unlikely case that even one of his listeners might have forgotten Phocus, Pindar takes care, when he describes their prayer, to remind them of him (and slyly to hint at his own ingenuity) by assigning much more room to him than to his murderous half-brothers: ìEnda¹dov ˆrignätev u¬o© kaª b©a FÛkou kr”ontov, | ¾ tv qeoÓ, Án Yam†qeia t©ktì –pª çhgm±ni p»ntou, ‘Endais’ illustrious sons and mighty prince | Phokos, son of the goddess Psamatheia who bore him on the seashore’ (–). But   Already Aeacus was celebrated as a paragon of hospitality for the kindness he showed to the ambassadors who came to beg him to intercede with his father in order to save Greece from a drought, cf. Isoc. ..; Diod. Sic. ..–; Apollod. ... Paus. ..– reports that a relief at the very entrance of the Aeaceum showed the scene of his reception of the ambassadors. Burnett : – tries to explain Pindar’s silence by suggesting that Phocus is a monster, so that slaying him is a positively valued civilising act. The suggestion is ingenious, but it is supported by nothing in the text and is contradicted both by the poet’s friendly association of the three brothers at prayer and by his own emphatic and morally justified silence. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most at the same time Pindar massively deploys the language of moral outrage so that he himself need not narrate the scandalous event. In this way he can do precisely what the Italians mean with the phrase, ‘avere la moglie ubriaca e la botte piena’ (we say, less colourfully, ‘to have his cake and to eat it too’): namely to take two alternatives which under normal circumstances are mutually exclusive and nonetheless to fulfil both of them at once – in the present case, to retain both Peleus’ virtuous character and his journey to Magnesia. Whether Pindar wished thereby to give expression to his own deeply felt personal religiosity, or whether instead, like some clever politicians nowadays, he had discovered that no pretext is less suspect and more incontestable than a religious one, is a question best left undecided. In any case what he succeeded in achieving was to suggest to his listeners a highly moral interpretation of a highly dubious story. Perhaps some of his listeners realised that the price for this success was the logical difficulty of no longer having a satisfactory answer to the question, ‘But then what was Peleus doing in Magnesia after all?’ Comparing the communicative relation between poet and public in this poem with that in Bacchylides  makes a striking difference emerge. Bacchylides presupposes his listeners’ familiarity with certain stories in order to achieve dramatic irony; in doing so he confirms their previous knowledge and tacitly deploys it to achieve a new and surprising aim. Pindar also presupposes that his listeners know certain stories, but instead of simply confirming their previous knowledge he exploits it flamboyantly, explicitly refusing to narrate it himself on the grounds that it is morally or religiously questionable. Both leave many things unsaid and rely on what is unsaid for the pragmatics of praise. But where Bacchylides allows his listeners themselves to contribute from the stock of their existing knowledge what they now need in order to complete his retelling of the myth, Pindar explicitly repudiates elements of that shared knowledge as being unsuitable themes for celebratory song, topics which, unlike other, less scrupulous poets, he himself refuses to speak out. The emphasis shifts to the poetic persona and the ethics of song. And where Bacchylides permits his listeners to cooperate with him in producing the meaning of his song, Pindar limits them within narrow bounds and imposes the meaning of his song upon them.  The question of Pindar’s personal religiosity has been much studied, at least until recently, but the results have been inconclusive: see e.g. Schroeder , Fränkel , Rudberg  and Thummer . How much light can be cast by his poetry upon Greek cult practices and beliefs is of course another question. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  Upon this tentative foundation, let us consider more briefly the second, far more famous pair of poems. The myth of Heracles and Meleager as it is told in Bacchylides  is a brilliant recycling of various celebrated episodes from the Homeric epics. Not only is Bacchylides’ account of Meleager a direct descendant of Phoenix’s well-known speech in Book  of the Iliad, in which he tells Achilles the story of that hero in the hope of assuaging his wrath. Here too, as in the goddess’ speech in poem , Bacchylides makes the events more lively and dramatic by not recounting them himself but placing them instead in the mouth of a character. The fact that this character is Meleager himself and that he narrates not only his life, but also his death, lends his autobiography a particular pathos: by allowing a dying hero to apply to himself Homer’s description of the death of Hector, Bacchylides gives new life, as it were, to the venerable language of epic. What is more, Heracles, who descends to the Underworld in order to perform a seemingly impossible task but along the way cannot resist the temptation of conversing with the souls of the great figures of Greek legend, is obviously a successor of the Odysseus of the Nekyia (although, in mythical terms, Odysseus belonged to a later generation of heroes than Heracles). As though the general similarity between the two exceptional situations were not enough to establish this poem’s dependence upon Book  of the Odyssey, Bacchylides makes their relation obvious by means of an unmistakable allusion: for when Heracles sees the mighty Meleager in the Underworld, his first reaction is to reach for his famous bow in fear (.–): t¼n dì Þv ­den ìAlkmž<n>iov qaumast¼v ¤rwv t. [e]Åcesi lamp»menon, neur‡n –p”base liguklagg korÛnav, calke»kranon dì ›peit’ ›x e¯leto «¼n ˆnaptÅxav jar”trav pämaá    On this poem, see, besides the commentaries of Jebb : – and Maehler : ii – and : –, at least Stern , Brannan , Lefkowitz : –, Goldhill , Burnett : –, Pinsent , Cairns  and Sevieri : –. On the Meleager legend, see Irigoin et al. : – and now in general Grossardt . On the Homeric episode see especially Kakridis : –, Willcock , March : – and Hainsworth : –. Compare m©nuqen d” moi yuc‡ gluke±aá | gnän d ì ½ligosqen”wn, | a«a±á pÅmaton d• pn”wn d†krusa tl†. [mwn,] | ˆgla‡n ¤ban prole©pwn (Bacch. .–) with î Wv Šra min e«p»nta t”lov qan†toio k†luye, | yucŸ d ì –k çeq”wn ptam”nh *·dov d• bebžkei | Án p»tmon go»wsa lipoÓs ì ˆndrotta kaª ¤bhn. (Il. .–) The connection is noted by Lefkowitz :  and Maehler : ii –. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most and when the wonderful hero, Alcmena’s son, saw him shining in armor, he put the clear-twanging string on his bow-hook, then opened the lid of his quiver and took out a bronze-headed arrow. But this is the very same gesture that Odysseus saw the eidolon of the dead Heracles performing in the Homeric Nekyia (Od. .–): ˆmjª d” min klaggŸ nekÅwn §n o«wnän ãv, p†ntos ì ˆtuzom”nwná ¾ dì –remn¦‚ nuktª –oikÛv, gumn¼n t»xon ›cwn kaª –pª neurjin ½·st»n, dein¼n papta©nwn, a«eª bal”onti –oikÛv. All around him was a clamor of the dead as of birds scattering scared in every direction; but he came on, like dark night, holding his bow bare with an arrow laid on the bowstring, and forever looking, as one who shot, with terrible glances. So the very first action of Bacchylides’ Heracles, who is still very much alive and anxious to defend himself against what he takes to be a dangerous attack, inevitably recalls to our minds the eternally, compulsively repeated movements of Homer’s Heracles, who is already long since dead: the fate of Bacchylides’ Heracles is sealed from the very beginning, and the very gesture by which he tries to prolong his life already indicates to us that he will someday die. Here too, as in his poem for Pytheas of Aegina, Bacchylides underlines the general similarities between his composition and its epic source by means of a series of detailed allusions – Homeric epithets, similes, formulas, metrical and linguistic peculiarities are markedly more frequent in this passage than elsewhere. And once again the apparent reason for these unmistakable references seems to lie in the poet’s intention to create a chilling dramatic irony. For Bacchylides’ Heracles admires the dead Meleager so greatly that he asks him if he happens to have a sister who resembles him in form – if so, he would like to marry her (–): t¼n d• meneptol”mou yuc‡ pros”ja Mele†grouá ‘l©pon clwraÅcena –n dÛmasi Da·†neiran, n·n ›ti crus”av KÅpridov qelximbr»tou.’   Trans. Lattimore : . The intertextual link is noted by Maehler : ii . E.g. karcar»donta (), o³† te (), the leaf simile (–, cf. Il. .–), qrasum”mnonov (), –gcesp†lou (–), etc. The epic diction in this poem is analysed in Lefkowitz . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  The spirit of Meleager, staunch in battle, addressed him: ‘I left in my home Deianeira, the bloom of youth on her neck, still without experience of golden Cypris, that enchantress of men.’ Heracles is always on the lookout for any danger that might come from the men and monsters that Hera would send against him, yet he can not even imagine what we recognise with a shudder: that his death will come neither from a man nor from a monster, but from a delicate maiden with the bloom of youth on her neck, one whom golden Cypris will infatuate and whose etymologically ominous name is Deianira, ‘Man-slayer’. From the only corner in which Heracles suspects no danger at all, he himself brings his destruction upon himself. Bacchylides can allow himself to break off his narrative right here without having to add a single word to it: so cleverly has he involved his listeners in the construction of his story’s meaning that he can be certain that we will all be able to complete it on our own without his help. What more impressive evidence could he have supplied to demonstrate the uncertainty of all human knowledge, than this ironic discrepancy between Heracles’ evident ignorance and our complacent certainty about our own knowledge of his ignorance? Pindar’s Olympian , composed for the same victory of Hieron’s at the Olympic games of  bc, is one of his most famous and controversial poems. In the present context I cannot hope to deal with all the problems of a text over many aspects of which scholars have argued for centuries without reaching a consensus. Instead I shall limit myself to the simple observation that in this poem too, as in Nemean , Pindar interrupts the expected course of a mythic narrative at a dramatic point and corrects it with reference to alleged religious scruples, so that he can integrate it into the conceptual structure of his poem. That structure requires that Hieron’s victorious horse race at Olympia find a mythic precedent in Pelops’ victorious chariot race, likewise at Olympia; perhaps Pindar also intended to provide a mythic parallel for the hope, which he also expresses (–), that Hieron might someday win an Olympian victory in the chariot race as well. No victory can be won without divine favour: Pelops must ask the horse-god Poseidon for help, and he has every right to do so, since he was once the god’s eromenos.   On the effect of this remarkable technique see Lefkowitz : –, Goldhill :  and Rengakos :  (who usefully terms it ‘Abbrechen mediis in rebus’ and ‘lyrische Paraleipsis’). The bibliography on this ode is immense. See, besides the commentaries of Lehnus : –, Gerber  and Verdenius : –, at least Kakridis , Segal , Köhnken , Lefkowitz : –, Sicking  and Fisker . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most In Pindar’s poem, Pelops and his divine erastes comport themselves with one another politely and courteously, with all the grace and elegance of the finest aristocrats of the early fifth century. But unfortunately the first thing that most people in Pindar’s day probably associated with Pelops was the legend (which, by the way, is attested for the first time in this poem ) according to which Pelops’ own father Tantalus cut him into pieces, cooked him and gave him to the gods to eat. Demeter was even said to have eaten part of his shoulder in a fit of absent-mindedness, so that, after the horrified gods had restored the child, he had to receive an ivory prosthesis in its place – Pliny (Nat. hist. .) and Pausanias (..) both report that the relic was displayed in Elis before their time. Pindar’s choice of this myth inevitably posed a thorny problem for him (and this may well have been precisely why he chose it): how could aristocratic elegance possibly be reconciled with infanticide and divine anthropophagy? As it happens, in this ode the unwelcome aspects of the legend are in fact far less embarrassing for the general conception of the poem than was the case in Nemean : for there the whole myth was concerned with Peleus, who could not easily be portrayed at one and the same time as both murderous and pious; but here the main figure is not the criminal Tantalus, but rather his innocent son Pelops, whose miraculous restoration could easily have been interpreted as a sign of divine honour for him. Nevertheless Pindar decided to surprise his listeners’ expectations even more massively in this poem than he did in the other one. Whereas in Nemean  he merely refused explicitly to narrate the murder of Phocus but accepted it as a fact which he himself would pass over in silence, here in Olympian  his procedure is much more radical: he completely rejects the truthfulness of the transmitted legend and replaces it with a different version which is more compatible with his poem (and perhaps also with his religious sentiment). As is well known, Pindar turns Tantalus’ notorious banquet into t¼n eÉnomÛtaton –v ›ranon (‘to his most orderly feast’, –), from which the enamoured Poseidon chivalrously abducts the fair youth Pelops to Olympus, just as Zeus did with Ganymede (–) – an emblematic figure in early Greek aristocratic homoerotics.    This pattern of Athenian homoerotic behaviour has received much attention in recent years. See for example Koch-Harnack  and Meier . This raises an interesting methodological question: can we really be sure the legend preceded Pindar’s poem if we have no earlier testimonia? Despite the danger of circular reasoning, the answer is surely yes, for otherwise Pindar’s reference to earlier narrators of the story (Ol. .) becomes unintelligible. On Ganymede (whose name is the source of our word ‘catamite’), see e.g. Gerber :  and for a survey of the archaeological material Sichtermann . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  In poetry as in life, every solution brings new problems with it: so too here. Pindar’s inventive narrative strategy raises three new difficulties, which he solves with a little less than two-thirds success. The first problem is easy: how did the false legend arise? Pindar has an answer ready to hand: success always breeds envy; when the abducted young Pelops could no longer be found anywhere, a grudging neighbour spread the false rumour that the gods had eaten him (–). How on earth anyone could have ever thought of so bizarre an explanation and why anyone ever believed it are further questions that Pindar pauses neither to raise nor to answer. The second problem is a bit trickier: if Pelops was abducted by Poseidon to Olympus, then how did it happen that he later came back down to earth, where he had to drive his chariot victoriously against Oenomaus if he was to provide the central point of the mythic paradigm? Pindar’s answer is that Pelops’ father Tantalus stole nectar and ambrosia from the gods and gave it to his mortal dinner companions, whereupon he himself suffered his notorious punishment in the Underworld and his son was compelled to return to earth (–). Pindar’s solution is admittedly quite clever in juggling and harmonising the details of various disparate legends, but nonetheless it raises a whole host of new problems. If nectar and ambrosia produce immortality, then must not Tantalus’ dinner companions too have been made immortal by his gift along with him? But if so, what became of them? And what was the justice in Pelops’ being punished for his father’s crime? And finally how is this Tantalus, hubristic at dinner, to be reconciled with that earlier Tantalus to redeeming whose ‘most orderly feast’ Pindar had devoted such attention? As it were, the impiety that Pindar had taken pains to suppress at Tantalus’ original, anthropophagous dinner now makes a spectral return in this new felonious banquet. But the third problem is the hardest of all: for if Pelops was in fact never dismembered and restored – and if the tale of the gods’ feasting upon him was indeed nothing more than the unfounded calumny of envious neighbours, then there was no dismemberment in the first place and hence no need for restoration – then how was his celebrated ivory shoulder to be explained? Pindar’s answer has led to endless discussion among scholars and will perhaps never be elucidated satisfactorily. For he seems to hint at the one version involving anthropophagy and prosthesis, which he himself will turn out to reject, at the beginning of his narrative, reporting it at first as though it were correct; but at the same time he narrates it so ambiguously that it can later be seen retrospectively to imply instead that other version which he will end up declaring to be the right one (vv. –): Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most toÓ megasqenŸv –r†ssato Gai†ocov Poseid†n, –pe© nin kaqaroÓ l”bhtov ›xele KlwqÛ, –l”janti ja©dimon åmon kekadm”non. With whom mighty Earthholder Poseidon fell in love, after Klotho pulled him from the pure cauldron, distinguished by his shoulder gleaming with ivory. Evidently the epithet kaqaroÓ (‘pure’), applied to the cauldron, is intended to correct the traditional version, just like, a few lines later, the phrase referring to Tantalus’ ‘most orderly feast’: the positive expressions are clearly hyperbolic, not so much euphemistic in intent as rather rehabilitative. But Pindar’s account leaves at least one question embarrassingly open: what precisely was the occasion on which Poseidon fell in love with Pelops? Already the ancient scholia were divided on whether to take –pe© (translated here as ‘after’) as causal or temporal ; nor have modern scholars succeeded in deciding the question once and for all. If the conjunction is intended to indicate the causal reason for Poseidon’s love – Poseidon fell in love with Pelops because the youth had received such a wonderful shoulder (presumably at birth, for if not at that time, then when else, and why?) – then the reason for the ivory prosthesis remains entirely obscure, and no satisfactory explanation can be offered either for the start of the god’s passion or for his delay in fulfilling it. But if –pe© is intended instead to indicate the time of his love – Poseidon fell in love with Pelops when the youth received such a wonderful shoulder – then either this must have happened during the very same notorious dinner whose existence Pindar is at such pains to deny, or else we must conclude that Poseidon fell (sexually?) in love with a newborn infant. It is not likely that a definitive answer to this conundrum will ever be found. What is clear is that Pindar was willing to create a certain degree of confusion among his listeners – and those who originally heard the poem produced, accompanied by music and dance, are hardly likely to have been more successful at fathoming its perplexities than scholars have been who have been able to reread it at their leisure for centuries. Just as in Nemean  it seems finally not to have been very important to Pindar to establish a causal chain coherent in all its details when he told the legend of Peleus, so that in the end he left unanswered the question why the hero went to Magnesia, so too in Olympian  his primary concern seems to   S Ol. .– (i: , – Dr.). On the difficulties of –pe© here see Gerber : – and Hummel : §. Slater a:  s.v. –pe© a lists this passage under the conjunction’s temporal usage. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  be not to offer a version of the legend of Pelops which careful inspection can reveal to be fully self-consistent, but rather to astonish his listeners by suggesting to them that a myth they had always thought true was at least partially false. Instead of confirming his listeners’ knowledge, as Bacchylides does, Pindar prefers to correct it, radically and heroically. In the programmatic words he addresses to Pelops himself: u¬• Tant†lou, s• dì ˆnt©a prot”rwn jq”gxomai, ‘Son of Tantalus, of you I shall say, contrary to my predecessors’ (Ol. .). The preliminary results obtained by these twin comparisons can be summarised as follows: Bacchylides presupposes his listeners’ complicity with him and constructs literary meaning in cooperation with them as apparent equals. Pindar, on the contrary, either rejects his listeners’ previous knowledge at least in part and endeavours to replace it with his own version of the events, which he justifies as being religiously and morally superior or summons up that knowledge only to dismiss it as unsuitable for song. How can such a difference be explained? We might be tempted to see in this difference between two kinds of poetry merely a difference between two kinds of personal character: perhaps Pindar was simply haughty and arrogant as a person, Bacchylides sociable and affable. Although I suspect that most people would rather spend an evening in a pub chatting with Bacchylides than with Pindar, it must be admitted that personality does not explain everything. Above all, trying to explain these poetic differences by appeal solely to their authors’ characters could not help us to understand how two so very different communicative strategies were both able to function within the conditions of the performance situation of epinician poetry, and with considerable success. For had they not both been successful with their first audiences (and then again for generations afterwards), we would surely no longer possess them today. Perhaps the most direct route to my explanatory hypothesis is via a brief detour by way of an analogy. It has long been recognised that the epinician situation confronted poets like Pindar and Bacchylides with two quite different tasks, which we may term individualisation and integration. The institutionally public character of choral lyric meant that their poems, as distinguished from the somewhat more restrictedly accessible monodic lyric, had to satisfy not only the victor and his family but also his polis. But these two different addressees, the victor and his city, confronted the poet with two very different challenges. On the one hand he had to celebrate  See most recently Crotty : –; Kurke : –; Mann ; Boeke : –. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most the victor in the fullness of his triumph – after all, it was the victor who had paid for the poem, and he doubtless expected the poet to praise him so that he seemed superior to others and worthy of his victory. But on the other hand the poet also had to take account of the expectations and needs of the victor’s fellow-citizens, if they were not to reject the victor as arrogant and dangerous to the community. That is why the epinician poets sing not only of the victor’s great felicity and brilliant success, but also of the insuperable limits of human possibility, and why they magnify the victor’s unique lot and simultaneously warn him to exercise self-control and moderation – thereby of course further praising him, since such a warning has little sense applied to the anonymous masses. Poetic success can only be achieved along the razor’s edge of the kairos, and on both sides lurk dangers: if the poet exaggerates integration at the cost of individualisation, the patron will be angry with the poet; but if he exaggerates individualisation at the cost of integration, then the patron’s fellow-citizens will be angry with the patron. No epinician poet names a successful mortal without indicating his mortality and his essential dependence upon divine favour – and behind the jealousy of the gods, which is always possible, lurks the envy of men, which is dead certain. This tension between individualising and integrating aspects is evidently constitutive for the relation that the epinician poet establishes between the victor and his city. My suggestion is that another version of that same tension applies to the relation between the poet and his audience, and that, at least in the four poems we have considered here, Pindar tends to emphasise the individualisation of the poet with regard to his listeners while Bacchylides seeks the appearance of integration of the poet with them. Bacchylides adopts the voice of the laudatory citizenry and puts himself in the place of an admiring fellow-citizen; he seems to take his listeners’ previous knowledge seriously, collaborates with them as apparent equals and does everything possible to play down the differences between poet and public. Pindar, by contrast, puts himself in the place of the proud victor and speaks down from that exalted position to the massed public: he autocratically corrects his listeners’ previous knowledge or instructs them in its proper deployment, imposes his own version of familiar stories upon them and does everything possible to play up the differences between poet and public. Bacchylides presents himself as a listener who has heard and admired the same great poetic texts as we have and is eager to bring them back to life in  This has been noted especially by Carey : –. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  collaboration with us. Pindar presents himself as a speaker who has studied the poets of the past more critically than we have and who will now show us why he can understand them better than we, and can write poems better than they. It is surely not accidental that Bacchylides’ most impressive effects in these two poems come from his detailed confrontation with the Iliad and Odyssey – indeed, one is tempted to suggest that Bacchylides could presuppose among at least some of his listeners detailed knowledge of a relatively standardised form of the oral or written text of the Homeric epics – whereas Pindar almost always avoids the two genuine Homeric epics and prefers instead to attack the Cyclic epics. It is likewise surely not accidental that Pindar uses the metaphor of the poet as an athlete much more frequently than Bacchylides does and that he usually represents himself thereby as triumphing over defeated opponents, nor that Pindar can claim to derive his poetry directly from a divine source – manteÅeo, Mo±sa, projateÅsw dì –gÛ, ‘Give me an oracle, Muse, and I shall be your prophet’ (fr. ) – while Bacchylides has no difficulty conceding that human poets have always learned from other human poets (fr. ):  ™terov –x —t”rou soj»v t» te p†lai t» te nÓn. [oÉde g‡r çiston] ˆrržtwn –p”wn pÅlav –xeure±n. One gets his skill from another, now as in days of old, [for it is no easy matter] to discover the gates of verse unspoken before. If this is so, then the differences between Pindar’s and Bacchylides’ communicative strategies in the poems we have examined are perhaps not only a feature of their personalities. Pindar’s self-glorification here can also be recognised as serving the poetic function of lending greater brilliance to the splendour of the victors he celebrates, while Bacchylides’ more collaborative style helps create an amicable atmosphere in which the victory celebration can flourish. Of course, we have only considered four poems at all closely here, and it would be hazardous to extend these findings prematurely to     On Bacchylides’ relation to Homer see Pfeijffer c; on Pindar’s, see especially Nagy , also Fitch  and Nisetich . When Pindar does allude to the Iliad or Odyssey, he is generally polemical, even if somewhat circumspectly so (e.g. Nem. .–). On these athletic metaphors see Simpson , Lefkowitz , Steiner : –, Garcı́a Romero , Nünlist : –. Cf. also pae.  (fr. f, D Rutherford).. Cf. now Fearn : –. Bacchylides too, to be sure, can strike a thoroughly Pindaric oracular pose, at least once (.). But where does Pindar adopt a typically Bacchylidean collegial tone? Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most the rest of Pindar’s and Bacchylides’ oeuvres; but it might well be worth investigating their other extant poems in this light, looking for identical and closely related features. To be sure, many later readers have tended to prefer Pindar’s heroic gesture over Bacchylides’ somewhat more amiable tone – indeed, PseudoLonginus’ and Wilamowitz’s preferences for Pindar over Bacchylides simply transfer onto Pindar all the characteristics of an exalted victor and onto Bacchylides all those of a merely competent loser, as Pindar himself sings of them. But surely we can do better than to hoist Bacchylides with Pindar’s petard. In fact, the two poets are not both trying to achieve exactly the same goal, with more success in the one case and less in the other: rather, they are pursuing complementary strategies, each of them emphasising one aspect of the epinician poet’s communicative situation at the cost of another. A fully successful epinician pragmatics would no doubt have to take both aspects into account. I close with a small question about a single line of Pindar’s poetry that may be well suited to cast light upon his mode of self-presentation and his relation to his audience, precisely in their difference from Bacchylides. It is one of the most famous lines in all of Greek literature, so well known, indeed, that perhaps we no longer know exactly what it means. It comes towards the end of one of Pindar’s last victory odes, Pythian , and it reads in our editions: –p†meroiá t© d” tiv; t© dì oÎ tiv; ‘Creatures of a day! What is someone? What is not someone?’ (Pyth. .). The question is: what is the grammatical case of –p†mero¹ In modern commentaries and dictionaries the word is almost always taken as a nominative, as though we were supposed to supply in thought both a subject and a copulative verb, so that the resulting sense would be something like ‘(Men are) creatures of a day’ or ‘(We are) creatures of a day.’ But such an ellipse of both the subject and the verb can hardly be defended grammatically; no convincing parallel for this proposed construction has ever been found. Perhaps      Since we are dealing here only with divergent tendencies and not with absolute differences, it would not be surprising to discover occasional exceptions on both sides (e.g., for possible cases of Bacchylidean technique in Pindar, cf. Currie : –, ); but these do not, I believe, lessen the pertinence of this general distinction. And not only their poems: Luca Giuliani points out to me the remarkable stylisation of the fifthcentury portrait sculpture of Pindar, whose intricately twisted beard-knot seems to have mantic associations. On this portrait, see Smith : , pls. –; Bergemann ; Himmelmann ; and Currie :  n.. On this line, see Giannini . So e.g. Slater a:  s.v. –j†merov, -iov b.: ‘–p†meroi (sc. e«sªn Šnqrwpoi)’. See Kühner and Gerth: i – (ellipse of the subject), – (ellipse of the copula). The full discussion of the general phenomenon in Hummel : §– provides no parallel for such an interpretation. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:      Poet and public: Pindar and Bacchylides January ,  :  one might also think of the word as a noun forming by itself a nominal phrase, or of a nominative of exclamation; but neither possibility is free of difficulties. Surely it is at least worth considering whether, as some ancient commentators proposed, we ought rather to take it as a vocative; after all, the use of d” after a vocative in questions and other kinds of sentences is well established. If we choose to understand the passage in this way, then Pindar will not be saying that all men are creatures of a day, but instead he will be calling his listeners creatures of a day and asking them what the difference is between someone and no one. Evidently the question is rhetorical: for them, creatures of a day, the answer must be that there is really no difference at all between someone and no one. But what about Pindar? Is the person who is calling his audience ‘creatures of a day’ in the vocative himself a creature of a day or not? As it happens, on this question Greek usage is ambiguous: sometimes the vocative includes the speaker together with his addressees within the same group, but at other times it separates him off from them and assigns him and them to two different groups. Thus, in one stasimon of Euripides’ Orestes the chorus address mortals as –jam”rwn ›qnh (‘tribes of creatures of a day’, Eur. Or. ), but there can be little doubt that they mean to include themselves within this designation; by contrast, in the parabasis of Aristophanes’ Birds, in a passage full of reminiscences of these words from Pindar’s Pythian , the chorus of birds addresses the mortal audience as –jhm”rioi (Ar. Av. ), and it seems quite clear that in this case the birds mean that humans are creatures of a day but that the birds themselves are not. What then of Pindar? We may well hesitate to believe that in these words he is endeavouring firmly to set himself outside of the bounds of the human race; and the vocative, if indeed it is a vocative, remains resolutely      For the former, cf. Hummel : §, and in general Lanérès ; but the expression of the predicate alone, the subject remaining implicit, would be very strange. For the latter, see Kühner and Gerth: i .; but the examples I know of are all in the singular and are closely linked to a specific dramatic situation upon which the speaker is expressing a judgment. S Pyth. .b (ii: , –,  Dr.) takes the word as a vocative, S Pyth. .a (ii: , – Dr.) glosses it as a partitive genitive plural linked with the nominative singular tiv, i.e. apparently as a kind of nominative plural. The S Thom.-Tricl. ad Pyth. . (p.  Mommsen) understands –jžmeroi as a predicate nominative adjective, supplying Šnqrwpoi explicitly and leaving the copula unexpressed. See Kühner and Gerth i: –; ii: –: ., and Denniston : –. Slater a:  s.v. d” .a lists a number of passages in which the particle follows a vocative. The usage is recognised and discussed in Hummel : §– (p. ). See on this passage West a: –. See on this passage Dunbar : – Cf. also Ar. Nub.  with scholia (S Ar. Nub. c.a, b Holwerda) and Pl. Rep. .d. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Agocs ISBN:       January ,  : glenn w. most ambiguous. But perhaps precisely that ambiguity is the effect Pindar wanted to achieve – an effect we can scarcely even imagine Bacchylides ever seeking. This is one of Pindar’s very last poems. His aged body, he knows, is mortal, and it will not last much longer: but the choral poetic voice that has spoken through him for his whole life and that is speaking through him even now is divine, and it will endure. Let us repunctuate slightly: –p†meroi, t© d” tiv; t© dì oÎ tiv; ‘Creatures of a day, what is someone? What is not someone?’ Whatever his listeners are; whatever his rivals are – he, Pindar, just like the victors he has always celebrated, is someone.  For Pindar’s own heroisation, cf. Currie :  n.; .