In this evocative treatment of Pindar's epinicians, S. boldly eschews the historicising parameters of much recent scholarship, and focuses instead on what makes the poems valuable ‘as poetry’ (p. 8). She finds the answer in the ‘intrapoetic immortality’ that Pindar's songs construct and bestow on athletic victors. On her argument, this immortality should not be understood in functional terms as a ‘purveyance of social and economic goods and services’ (p. 9). Rather, it is enacted within the poems as a construction of time in which past, present and future are experienced as a ‘living unity’ and which is made available through the poems’ construction of a ‘poetic-prophetic vision’ (p. 6). By exploring these intrapoetic figurations, the book aims to shed fresh light on the poetry's affective qualities.
Pursuing her analysis of how fifth-century realities ‘become the stuff and substance of immortality’ through the action of the poem (p. 10), S. devotes two chapters to the building-blocks of Pindar's poetic technique. The first chapter finds Pindar's epinicians engaged in ‘an ongoing synthesis of the past, present, and future of a victor's polis’ (p. 14) by comparing Pindar with Homer. Discussing the two authors’ compound adjectives, S. argues that in Homer they reflect the past's givenness and its detachment from the present. Pindar's ‘animated’ (p. 19) poetry, by contrast, calls attention to its use of freshly-coined compound adjectives which, like epinicians themselves, are strongly occasional, expressing ‘images and notions that did not exist before [the] song evoked them’ (p. 21). In both Homer's digressions and Pindar's narratives, the move of beginning with a relative pronoun creates the impression that ‘the narrative frees itself from the authority of the narrator and begins to unfold itself’ (p. 28), but Pindar thematises transitions between stages in a narrative in a way that Homer does not (exemplified by an analysis of Pythian 9, pp. 28–43). The result is a synthesis of past and future, the song's production of which is insistently accentuated (pp. 44–5). The second chapter argues that the motif of the ‘song-journey’ also contributes to this synthesis of times. Constructed around the poles of ξενία and νόστος, the song-journey forges ‘interconnection’ (p. 78) between an always-incomplete movement towards an ‘intrapoetic future’, associated with arrival at the host's home (p. 62), and return to the poet's past and homeland. Analysing Pindar's self-referential use of future tenses, S. stresses the song-journey's incompleteness (pp. 66–71), which brings about an equation between the ‘always-impending consummation’ of ξενία and ‘the poet's intended reinvigoration’ of the victor and his city (p. 84). Crucially for S., however, the temporal poles of ξενία and νόστος are always simultaneously connected in the ‘intrapoetic now’ (p. 84).
Chapters 3 and 4 see this synthetic configuration of time instantiated in Pythians 11 and 4. Central to S.’s reading of Pythian 11 are the temporal trajectories of the poem's actors. S. neatly brings out the inverse parallelism between Orestes and Agamemnon, and argues that Clytemnestra ‘ruptures’ the unity of time by disturbing the development of the house (p. 93), while Thrasydaeus does the opposite by revivifying his ancestors’ glory through his victory. Pythian 4 accomplishes a similar task by healing a rift in the body politic and restoring Cyrene to health (p. 128), an action thematised by the representation of Pindar and Jason as healers (pp. 128–36). This reading is preceded by a deft analysis of the ‘cycles’ constituted by the Cyrenean and Argonautic parts of the narrative (pp. 113–28). An appendix compares Pindar's mythopoeia with Bacchylides’ (pp. 170–82).
Elegantly written and engaging, S.’s book will be read with pleasure by Pindarists and those with interests in fifth-century choral poetry, and is valuable for its focus on the poems’ idiomatic articulation of their concerns (see e.g. p. 87). There are some areas, however, in which S.’s approach produces questionable conclusions. Her emphasis on the epinician's production of temporal ‘unity’ sometimes obscures the extent to which relations between temporal domains can be differential as well as synthetic. In her reading of Pythian 11, S. sees Thrasydaeus’ ‘recalling’ his ancestral hearth by means of his victory (ἔμνασεν ἑστίαν, Pyth. 11.13) as ‘reviving the past as a living part of the present’ (p. 108), but this characterisation does not square easily with the description of the victories won by Thrasydaeus and his father (Ὀλυμπίᾳ τ’ ἀγώνων πολυϕάτων | ἔσχον θοὰν ἀκτῖνα σὺν ἵπποις, ‘and at Olympia from famous contests they seized swift radiance with horses’, Pyth. 11.47–8). ‘Radiance’ here is a metaphor for victory, while ‘swift’ is an adjective transferred from the act of winning to its results. The lines suggest victory's impermanence as well as its affective power, θοάν hinting at the fleeting moment at which glory is achieved, and their referential obliqueness (ἔσχον is metaphorical in relation both to σὺν ἵπποις and ἀκτῖνα) creates an indirect mode of access to the past. In realising this access for themselves, listeners are involved in an imaginative recreation of the event that affirms and is heightened by their separation from it. Temporal differentiation is also at work in the poem's political statements. Pindar praises the flourishing of the ‘middling estate’ in the city (τὰ μέσα μακροτέρῳ | {σὺν} ὄλβῳ τεθαλότα, 52–3), castigates the tyrant's life (53) and advocates achievements that bring shared benefits to the community (ξυναῖσι δ’ ἀμφ’ ἀρεταῖς τέταμαι, 54). The horizons of political action envisaged here afford individual agents a different framework from that which was available to Orestes, and implicitly diminish the possibility of the disruptions to social order exemplified by the mythical narrative. Rather than producing a simple ‘unity of past and present’ (p. 109), the poem presents listeners with more and less distinct connections and distinctions between temporal periods.
S.’s attention to the intrapoetic qualities of epinician ‘songworlds’ is a welcome rejoinder to the widespread tendency in modern scholarship to seek the genre's primary significance in its contribution to its socio-historical environment, but more might have been said about the move of prioritising formal over contextualising readings (see e.g. pp. 7–11, 54–5). An obvious qualification is that ‘intrapoetic songworlds’ only have purchase when realised in acts of performance, response and interpretation, and that these realisations will be variously affected by the contexts, intellectual and social, in which they occur. The concomitant need for attention to the intersection between formal features and social realisation is particularly pressing in the case of Pindar's epinicians, which often thematise their attempts to intervene in the world.
Such thematisation bears on S.’s reading of Pythian 4. Sensibly bracketing the historical circumstances of Damophilus’ exile, S. argues that the poem achieves Damophilus’ reintegration into Cyrene intrapoetically, by showing him ‘embraced by Pindar's song’ (p. 135) and ‘dissolv[ing]’ the distinctions between him and Arcesilas (pp. 135–6). It could be objected that the emphasis on Arcesilas as ruler (267–8) and Damophilus as ‘attendant’ (θεράπων, 287) obviates such a reading. More important is the poem's self-contextualisation. The poem can be said to enact Damophilus’ social legitimisation, in so far as listening to the description of his character at 279–87 and envisaging his presence at a Cyrenean symposium (295–6) repeats the recognition of these features attributed to Cyrene at 279 (ἐπέγνω μὲν Κυράνα). Yet the positing of the prior ‘recognition’ foregrounds the poem's participation in shared frameworks of understanding and valuation. Equally, the representation of Damophilus as an ethically paradigmatic figure combines with the earlier injunctions to Arcesilas (263, 269–70) and thus foregrounds the poem's aim to affect listeners’ engagement with the world. The pasts and futures into which the poem integrates itself are those of listeners’ poetic and ethical experience as much as ‘intrapoetic’ constructs. But while, as here, her arguments could sometimes be expanded, S.’s elegant readings are a timely reminder of Pindar's formal challenges.
