In the introduction, F. positions himself as moving away from historicising readings of Pindar's engagement with material culture and visual phenomena (such readings having been in vogue over the course of the last generation of Pindaric scholarship) in order to take a more literary approach to Pindar's material worlds. In doing so, he does not plan to return to a New Critical formalism, but plans to offer a reading that is engaged with questions of aesthetics, literary form and context (p. 5). He perhaps best articulates this approach when he says, ‘A view of Pindaric epinician poetics emerges that is much more focused on the issue of the representability of reality, and the extent to which encomiastic poetry can ever fully preserve and allow access to the rich contextual circumstances of its laudandi’ (p. 9). In closing, F. contextualises epinician poetry in relation to contemporary commemorative materials (victory sculptures and epigraphic texts) and provides an outline of the chapters to follow.
In Chapter 1 F. focuses on Nem. 5, and he begins with the famed opening (‘I am not a statue maker …’). F. urges that, instead of viewing Pindar as antagonistic to sculpture, readers should see him here as offering an ‘attitude’ towards it, poetry and their ‘efficacy’ (p. 20); here F. nicely points out that Pindar's reference need not be restricted to victory statuary. F. suggests that in the ode's opening ‘Pindar's sense of lyric space and movement offers an aesthetics concerned with art's scope and potential, not with space as immediately or directly conceivable as historical or sociopolitical’ (p. 21). I would counter that Pindar comments on the ability of his song to be mobile in a manner that sculpture is not: he does not make a claim about ‘lyric space’; Pindar's space is literal. The chapter includes discussion of Ol. 1.28–34, but I do not think that F. understands Pindar's Greek in that passage (kharis does not mean Grace; cf. a similar problem regarding the signification of the Charites at p. 60). (For discussion of kharis in this passage, see C. Eckerman, ‘Notes to a Recent Edition of Pindar's Olympian Odes. A Review Article to Accompany Michel Briand, Pindare. Olympiques (texte établi par A Puech)’, Exemplaria Classica 19 [2015], 193–202.) Later in the chapter, F. turns to interpret the end of Nem. 5, but his reading is based on a misunderstanding of lines 50–4 (for discussion of the end of Nem. 5, see C. Eckerman, ‘I Weave a Variegated Headband: Metaphors for Song and Communication in Pindar's Odes,’ HSCP 110 [forthcoming]); and F. does not have the requisite familiarity with bibliography on this passage. Having worked through Nem. 5, F. closes the chapter by turning to Herodotus’ intertextuality with Pindar.
Chapter 2 revolves around Nem. 8. F. begins with reflections on the erotic subject matter of the proem and then turns to the role of Aegina's Aiakeion in the poem (pp. 108–9). This is a problem: there is not any clear-cut reference to the Aiakeion in Nem. 8, but F. develops an extended reading on the supposition that there is. Similarly, there is no reference to wreath dedication at lines 14–16, but F. takes it as a given (p. 132) (for further discussion, see Eckerman forthcoming). Included in this chapter, however, is a rich and valuable discussion of gesture and haptic diction in Nem. 8. A coda on Pyth. 8.56–60 concludes the chapter.
Pyth. 1 is the focus of the third chapter. F. begins with the famed apostrophe of the lyre at the ode's opening. F. asserts, ‘there is a sense here that lyric as a cosmic force is creating its own autonomous time’ (p. 174). There is no ‘lyric’ in this passage, however; there is a lyre. As noted above, F. made a similar slip with regard to space at the opening of Nem. 5. However, F.’s discussions of time, tense, ekphrasis, sound and prayer in this chapter are rewarding and extend the book's scope beyond the ‘visual and material culture’ promised in its subtitle. The chapter closes with reflections on the problematics of time in relation to the historical Hieron.
In the final chapter F. turns to Simonides, Bacchylides and Nem. 10. When addressing Simonides’ Danae fragment, F. claims that its opening words (‘in the decorated chest’) ‘gesture towards’ (p. 234) an ecphrastic frame for the passage. This is not obvious, and the claim will seem unwarranted to some readers: the phrase ‘gesture toward’ seems to be chosen to provide F. with intellectual wiggle-room. Nonetheless, having made this statement, F. develops further claims from it, for example, that the phrase ‘in the decorated chest’ ‘raise[s] the stakes for the relation between artifice and truth, and art and text, in lyric’ (p. 234). I note, however, that with the words ‘in the decorated chest’ Simonides is only stating Perseus’ and Danae's location; F. here makes tendentious claims regarding Simonidean poetics. It is not obvious that Simonides here raises ‘ambivalent questions about poetry and materiality’ (p. 235). Such sleights of hand are a recurrent problem of F.’s argumentative style. Having developed an ‘aesthetic’ reading of the Danae fragment, F. turns to the opening of Bacchylides 5 and provides an insightful reading of the visual poetics of its opening. In a very brief conclusion (three pages), F. reflects on the goals of his project and makes suggestions for developing similar methodological approaches to Pindar's odes.
I offer some final thoughts. F.’s chapter-theses are not argumentative theses; they are open-ended declarations of themes that F. will touch on. In this regard, I was left treading water, wondering if in any particular chapter there is an argument being made and how one could decide if F. had adequately defended it if there were. Readers expecting scholarship based on deductive reasoning will at times be disappointed, and inductive trains of thought can lead F. to over-interpret. As noted above, F. occasionally slips from one phenomenon (A) to another (B), as though they were akin, for example literal space (A)/lyric space (B); lyre (A)/lyric(B), and thereafter develops a reading related to B, although the text does not provide evidence for anything other than A; this is a serious impediment to following F. where he wants to lead us. With regard to his engagement with scholars who have worked on Pindaric poetry, F. at times skims the bibliographic surface; this is unfortunate, given the historical depth of excellent scholarship on Pindar. F. regularly gives agency to inanimate phenomena (e.g. ‘Pindaric lyric is interested in’ [p. 17]; ‘N.5 manipulates audiences’ reactions’ [p. 23] etc.) and thereby has a related tendency to muddle important literary phenomena (e.g. texts and authors) that should be discussed with precision. Within the framework of this review I have focused more attention on questions of philology than on F.’s extended overviews of theoretical positions (e.g. ritual/ritualization, pp. 118–24) because it is not the theories but the outputs of engagements with theories that are most important for the interpretation of Pindar's odes.
The book is generally well produced, but there are eye-raising errors: for example, an Iambi et Elegi Graeci post Alexandrum Cantati attributed to M.L. West (p. x); J. Fenno is not a woman (p. 58). With regard to the new method promised in the introduction, I cannot say that I found anything particularly novel. What I did find was an inclination to employ inductive reasoning within a cross-temporal frame, while argumentative theses were not developed; and, as noted above, F., while employing this method, has a tendency to make assertions that the texts cannot support. Nonetheless, F. is a powerful exegete of Pindar, and one has to evaluate all his readings individually.
