N.'s new book offers a richly textured account of the intricate political dynamics in the Greek west during the sixth and fifth centuries. Adopting a new-historicist approach, N. attempts to read victory songs side by side with coexisting, competing ‘non-literary’ texts – more precisely, a group of orally transmitted stories that he dubs ‘hero-athlete narratives’ – with a view to unpacking the politics of the form of these two memorialising media. As he remarks, while the genre of the hero-athlete narrative was generated and promoted by the higher ranks of society, in contrast to epinician (a ‘high’ genre), it can be classified as a ‘low’ cultural product, in the sense that these stories ‘were simple narratives, prosaic and unsophisticated in their form, easy to reproduce, eschewing authorship, and concerned with a much broader range of a city's territory and people’ (p. 317). N.'s attempt to examine both epinician and hero-athlete narratives as ‘products’ of the same historical era by downplaying the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ casts fresh light upon the epinician genre, thus encouraging both its investigation from a new vantage point and a new appreciation of the complexities and tensions of the communities within which it operated. The book will be of great interest to specialists and to advanced undergraduate students, in the latter case not least because of N.'s tendency to summarise his main theses, bringing clarity even where the argument is harder to follow.
The monograph consists of eight chapters framed by an introduction and a conclusion, a general index, a bibliography and several handy maps and timelines. As N. points out in the introduction, while victory odes overtly acknowledge their indebtedness to oral tradition, epinician's multiple references to the fallibility of popular stories and to its own superiority over them, in conjunction with its attempt to root its own authority in the practices of the local wise men, ‘suggest a much more complex context in which the work of that oral tradition was prized and the superiority of epinician was contested’ (p. 8). In light of this, although hitherto epinician's main competitor has normally been located in statuary, N. puts forward the attractive suggestion that epinician was far more concerned with hero-athlete narratives. He contends that these two genres promoted different visions of the athlete and society, and were ideologically opposed – a thesis premised on the fact that victors are typically associated with either one genre or the other, but not with both.
One of the greatest hurdles posed by hero-athlete narratives is their late recording during Imperial times, which raises issues concerning their authenticity and genesis. While in Chapter 1 N. demonstrates many methods for securing the circulation of these stories during the sixth and fifth centuries, this remains the most problematic aspect of his argument, considering that our sources are themselves ‘products’ of their own historical era and inevitably are also imbued with the agendas of their recorders.
Chapter 2 sets epinician against its competitor genre, with a view to mapping out their main differences in terms of their ideology and narratological structure. In contrast to epinician, in which myth plays a central role and the victor is closely attached to his community and family, in hero-athlete narratives the myth is absent and the victor is detached from his communal and familial surroundings. He is also more individualised and physically prominent, and his achievements are not limited to the athletic sphere. First and foremost he is heroised, a feature that N. does not identify in the odes. As N. stresses, these divergences do not merely reflect different social practices, but are responsive to them, with each genre validating a different model of athlete and community.
Chapter 3 discusses political developments in Sicily and Greek Southern Italy between 520 and 440 b.c.e., laying emphasis upon ‘athlopolitics’, a useful term coined by N. to encompass both athletic competition and the politicised ways in which victors promoted, framed and publicised their successes. One of N.'s most insightful arguments is that the choice to be honoured in one of these genres gradually became reflective of a particular stance towards the Deinomenid empire, and that athletes used it as a tool to broadcast their affiliation to the Deinomenids.
In the remaining chapters N. zooms in on specific communities, seeking to examine how the relationship between epinician and the hero-athlete narrative played out in them. The two genres are chiefly examined along four axes: the victor's portrayal and the features of the world in which he moves, his relationships to Syracuse and the Deinomenid regime, and the economy and politics implied in each case. Chapter 4 focuses on two victorious athletes from Epizephyrian Locri, Hagesidamus and Euthymus. N. interprets Pindar's Olympian 10 for the former and the hero-athlete narrative that framed the latter as intertexts that should be read against each other. As he points out, the distinctly different ways in which the two victors and their relationships to Locri are formulated is reflective of the tensions and polyphony of Locrian society.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to Crotoniate athletes, among others Philippus, who was framed with a hero-athlete narrative, and Astylus, who appears from the evidence to have commissioned an epinician from Simonides. On the grounds that in 485 Astylus left Croton to move to Syracuse during the city's refoundation by Gelon, N. proposes that the different media to which these two athletes entrusted their posthumous fame reflected the conflict between Croton and Syracuse at the time. Indeed, Astylus received an oral narrative as well, but he is not assimilated as a hero in it, a particularity that N. attributes to his naturalisation as a Syracusan. The chapter closes with the example of Phayllus of Croton, whose oral narrative has a ‘bizarre hybrid form’ and represents ‘a reinvention, or creative misuse, of the hero-athlete genre’ (p. 196). N. interprets this as another sign of the fluidity and incoherence of Crotoniate ideology in the 470s.
Chapter 6 embarks upon another athlete recipient of both an epinician and a hero-athlete narrative: Glaucus of Carystus. In Chapter 7 N. offers a new reading of Pindar's Olympian 12 for Ergoteles of Himera. Challenging Barrett's dating of the ode to 466, after the downfall of the Deinomenids, N. assumes an earlier dating in 470, during Hieron's rule (W.S. Barrett, ‘Pindar's Twelfth Olympian and the Fall of the Deinomenidai’, JHS 93 [1973], 23–35). The implication is that for N. Ergoteles' epinician commission is reflective of his pro-Deinomenidean feelings and does not celebrate Himera's liberation from the Deinomenids pace Barrett. N. rounds off his survey with a chapter on Alexidamus of Metapontium, whose example stands out in the sense that his commission of an epinician by Bacchylides (Ep. 11) does not signify affiliation with the Deinomenids.
N.'s book opens up new avenues for the study of epinician poetry by drawing attention to the polyphony of its embedding contexts. Far from standing in isolation, epinician is responsive to a number of other ideologically loaded media (not only statuary), and proves to be variously serviceable to each community. Yet, the task of unpacking the politics of the epinician form by putting hero-athlete narratives under scrutiny is not free of challenges, and while N. tries to get to grips with most of them, he does not always fully exploit the scarcity and ambivalence of his evidence to further nuance his argument. As a result, the book leaves many questions unanswered, while also raising a host of new ones. For instance, what happens with oral narratives that do not fall into the genre of the hero-athlete narrative? How do they interact with coexisting memorialising media? How legitimate is it to argue that hero-athlete narratives were the explicit provenance of the victor and his own? Could not their more negative aspects also be the work of rivals, or even of the lower orders? Moreover, are the variations in the features identified as staples of the two genres under discussion always ‘innocent’, or might they hint at ideological oppositions within the same genre? Another issue that deserves further examination concerns the similarities shared by the mythical heroes that feature in epinician and the victors' portrayal in hero-athlete narratives. Could this complicate the relationship between epinician and hero-athlete narratives? Are these two genres as oppositional as N. contends? But these questions should not detract from the value of N.'s attempt. His book is a significant contribution to scholarship on epinician and will certainly trigger new ‘narratives’ about this much-discussed genre from antiquity.
