The rich array of current Pindaric scholarship tends in two complementary directions. One approach reads Pindar's songs as texts that derive from and act within the cultural, political and social landscape of their native fifth century, for example N. Nicholson, The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire (2015). Another investigates Pindar's literary project in pursuit of its poetic strategies or its place in the history of Greek poetics, for example B. Maslov, Pindar and the Emergence of Literature (2015). By pursuing Pindar out of his fifth-century performance contexts and onto the Hellenistic page, P. charts a distinct and ambitious course which foregrounds the experience of Hellenistic readers encountering Pindar's poetry within the conceptual frameworks of an intellectual culture shaped by the library and its scholarly apparatus and the material framework of the book.

P.’s titular emphasis on the library – an institution characterised by a multiplicity of voices, organisational methods and modes of access, and conditioned by its own theoretical and practical commitments – aptly encapsulates the capaciousness and intermittent unwieldiness of the project's scope. A representative, but not exhaustive, list of the contexts in play includes reading habits, the history and theory of the book, editorial practices, commentaries, scholia, biographical traditions, and the role of historical and cultural change in diachronic readings. P.’s deep dive into these frameworks may surprise readers expecting the book's main event to be close engagement with the poems. As P. himself notes, ‘It might be objected that much of the material I have assessed … bears either not at all or only minimally and contingently on concrete acts of Pindaric interpretation, but one of the concepts that this study has attempted to complicate is that of what counts as a ‘literary experience’ (p. 288). This question is indeed productively posed and we are offered a ride on the intellectual and cultural currents that carried Hellenistic readers through Pindar's poems.

The centrality of these contexts and their construction for P.’s project is underscored by its structure: after a dense introduction laying out its theoretical orientations, the book divides into two sections. The first, ‘Contexts: to Alexandria and Beyond’, develops the intellectual and cultural frameworks – what P., borrowing and adapting Jauss’s term, calls ‘horizons of expectation’ (p. 28) – within which Hellenistic readers encountered their Pindar. The second, ‘Singing Pages’, considers Olympians 1 and 14 and Pythians 1, 11 and 12 within these horizons.Footnote ¹

The introduction, in which P.’s unmistakable erudition and careful theoretical work sometimes threaten the clarity of his presentation, is representative of both the strengths and weaknesses of the project as a ‘whole’.Footnote ² Developing the promise of the book's subtitle, P. positions himself within current conversations about the effects of the reorientation of texts created for performance within the medium of the book and book culture. P. successfully complicates the potential opposition between performance and reading through discussion of the interplay between the two modes within the odes themselves, in Hellenistic representations of Pindar's activity and in each encounter when a reader's voice was given over to the expression of Pindar's poetry. P. also lays out a methodology for approaching the texts in ‘diachronic form’. That is, he wants to think about them in the contexts that shaped ancient readers’ understandings in order to foreground their continuing openness to a reader's interpretation, adding the important proviso that his reconstruction of salient contexts is necessarily shaped by his own interpretative apparatus (p. 27). Finally, he argues that epinician, by virtue of its interest in ethical positioning, makes particular interpretative demands that require readers to position themselves within the text even as the (diachronic) text is repositioned within the readers' contemporary experience.

‘Contexts’ explores the importance of new Hellenistic frameworks for readerly experiences of Pindar as well as the challenges to modern scholars in accessing them. ‘Texts and Metatexts’ (Chapter 1) treats the effect of editions of Pindar arranged on generic and metrical principles and represented as colometrised texts, the interaction of these editions with scholarly work on Pindar's poems – and the extent to which we can access that work through the scholia as we have them – and the literary critical discourses of the time. The criticism includes discussion of issues like sonic quality which the scholia do not reflect; this reader, at least, will never look at vowels in Pindar in quite the same way. The chapter gives an effective sense of the way that these materials brought Hellenistic readers closer to Pindar's poems – by orienting them to issues of dating, for instance – while also underscoring their cultural distance from the world in which the poems were created. ‘Passing on the Garland: Receptions and Material Sites’ (Chapter 2) expands the scope to include a slightly hodgepodgy but engaging range of material that bears less directly on Pindar's corpus: Hellenistic epigram with its interest in the preservation of voice between performance and inscription, representations of Pindar as an elevated and distant figure in epigram and the biographical tradition, and the effect of critical signs as guides to both generic expectations and the interaction of poems within an edition.

In Part 2, ‘Singing Pages’, P. promises ‘close readings of Pindar's epinicians against the background of the cultural contexts examined in the previous two chapters' (p. 121). This promise is largely fulfilled through arguments that demonstrate the importance of readers' horizons, but P.’s tendency to focus on particular details in the odes and their resonances with various frameworks sometimes may lead his readers to feel that the responsibility for lacing these observations together into an understanding of an ode as a coherent whole falls to them. In this sense, P.’s work often echoes the contexts he studies by opening up interpretative avenues and inviting readers to pursue them as they will. ‘Edited Highlights’ (Chapter 3) plays nicely with the way in which the exemplarity of poems editorially sited at the opening of books, Olympian 1 and Pythian 1, become challenges for readers: how is Pelops as exemplary Olympian hero to be understood by readers distant from the cult site; how is Hieron's status as exemplary victor challenged by subsequent historical judgements of his rule? ‘Marginalia: Textual Encounters in the Scholia’ (Chapter 4) examines agonistic engagement with Homer and Hesiod in the Pindaric scholia as well as the construction of Pindar's own authority via his presence in scholia to other texts. ‘Closing the Book: Olympian 14’ (Chapter 5) focuses on that ode's representation of Echo as a messenger of victory to the victor's deceased father; P. develops her resonances as a figuration of performance and reperformance and the way in which these activities are reconditioned by subsequent representations of Echo and her voice. The final chapter, ‘Pythians 11 and 12: Materiality, Intertextuality, Closure’, considers the new significance generated by reading these odes as a closural pair; particularly effective is the discussion of how this ordering juxtaposes the poem's myths, of Orestes and Perseus respectively, thus drawing readers into an evaluation of Pindar's mythical strategy.

The breadth of contexts embraced by P.’s investigation is matched by the depth of fine-point analysis with which he pursues their implications. The result invites P.’s readers into a continuing conversation which is begun but not exhausted by the monograph. An ideal reader will already be well-versed in Pindar, conversant with some of the book's theoretical underpinnings and willing to be carried along with the flow of P.’s thoughts. The going is rarely easy, but for those who work on Pindar or the broader Hellenistic reception of earlier Greek literature, P. offers a stimulating reorientation to the Pindaric experiences of Hellenistic readers and a prod to greater self-consciousness of their own intellectual horizons.