In 1990, K. published her doctoral thesis on Pindar's victory odes under the title Pyrsos hymnon. It was a groundbreaking work of scholarship distinguished, as early reviewers pointed out (compare the reviews by D. Gerber, CR 41 [1991], 295–7 and S. Instone, Gnomon 65 [1993], 483–6), by K.'s impressive control of a broad range of sources and techniques including textual criticism, the history of religions, art history and archaeology. Now it is available to Anglophone readers in an excellent translation (with some additional bibliography and notes) by J.G. Howie, who has himself contributed much important work on Pindar. K.'s monograph has stood the test of time, the wisest of witnesses, remarkably well. This is because it helped to shift the frame of reference in Pindaric exegesis from rhetoric and convention to context: to a new style of reading that, building on the work of German reception theorists, French structuralists and the Urbino school, has become an international koine in the last two decades. One cannot today read Pindar, or any other early Greek poetic text, without considering performance, occasion and the original conditions of reception. K.'s painstaking exegesis of four Pindaric odes is a model for anyone working in this field, and for scholars and students of early Greek poetry more generally.

The introduction sets out the theoretical framework of analysis used in the following chapters, each of which presents a close reading of the relevant sections of a particular ode. It also includes a useful survey (pp. 12–37) of modern Pindaric scholarship from August Boeckh to the 1980s. K. begins from the occasionality of Greek lyric poetry. She argues that the occasion (understood both in the wider sense of a cause and in the narrower sense of a performance context) forms a cultural background taken for granted by the first audience which shaped their construction of meaning, and which modern readers must therefore reconstruct. K. adopts a sophisticated approach to the interconnections between cult ritual, performance and myth, and the social ideology these cultural institutions expressed, and to the problem of coherence which bedevilled modern Pindaric criticism from the beginning. Her work shows how understanding the external conditions that helped to frame the meaning of a song can help establish a network of connections between its apparently disparate themes and motifs.

Each of the four examples chosen by K. models a different kind of Pindaric reading, since the range of sources available for contextualisation is so different in each case. The first two, Isthmian 3/4 and Pythian 5, were chosen as examples of odes which foreground a particular cult. She argues that the meaning of Isthmian 3/4, a song for a pancratium-victor from Thebes, is implicated with the local cult of Heracles and his slain sons, the atmosphere of whose night festival is limned in powerful metaphor towards the poem's end (vv. 61–72). Carefully unpicking Pindar's contextual references and imagery, K. shows how these reflect the underlying ideology of the festival. In this ode, honouring the heroic dead coheres with honours paid to the victor; the Theban fire-festival of Heracles and his sons (which had an initiatory character and also incorporated athletic competitions) provides a context in which to frame a discourse of warrior masculinity and excellence that does not ignore the pathos of heroism, and against which the experience of one family can be made to merge with that of the community.

The chapter on Pythian 5, composed to celebrate a victory by Arcesilaus King of Cyrene, focuses on its use of the myth-ritual complex of the Dorian Carneia festival. K.'s reading of the ode begins from well-known ambiguities of voice and setting. When the speaker talks of ‘the Aegeidai, my fathers’ in v. 75–6, do we hear the voice of Pindar, or that of the Cyrenaean chorus that performs the song? How are we to read the poem's evocation of the topography of the city in relation to the mechanics of performance? Finally, how are we to understand the difficult allusion at vv. 82–8 to the mythical and ritual presence at Cyrene of the Sons of Antenor and Helen; and how does this allusion, together with references to the festival of the Carneia, function within the ode's larger political/moral theme: the story of Cyrene's seventh-century colonial foundation? Beginning with the topographical description, K. shows that the ode focuses on sites in or near the Agora closely connected to the original foundation, and that it was not a processional song. She sets out the facts concerning the Carneia as it was celebrated across the Dorian world, arguing that the ode is voiced throughout by the Cyrenaean chorus;Footnote ¹ that it refers to a recurring theoxenia-festival celebrating the earlier arrival of the Antenorids at the site; and that there is an underlying political-religious discourse, rooted in an identity at once pan-Dorian and local, that helps it to present the victory as an event shared by the whole community.

K.'s discussion of Olympian 1 for Hieron of Syracuse tackles the most perennial problem of this ode: Pindar's re-writing of the myth of Tantalus and Pelops. How could such a radical gesture of negation or replacement have won the favour of a fifth-century audience? The ode was not intended, she argues, for performance at the Olympic festival but rather at a symposium in Syracuse; still, it makes reference, towards the end of the myth, to the hero-cult of Pelops at Olympia. She shows that the hero's grave, its cult and the myths surrounding it establish a nexus of themes and metaphors in the ode, arguing that the ancient myth of Pelops' death and dismemberment, rooted in a defunct ideology of kingship and rites-of-passage at Olympia, is critiqued and replaced by an alternative story that emphasises eros and homoerotic initiation, warriorhood, athletics and the pleasures of the symposium (the latter three providing a link to Hieron's victory). Pindar's myth-critique is revealed to be a rationalisation of the traditional tale of the sort we find in later fifth-century writers.

The final chapter focuses on Olympian 3, another Sicilian ode, this time for Theron of Acragas. This is the only Pindaric victory ode bearing a title that refers to an original performance context (ΕΙΣ ΘΕΟΞΕΝΙΑ): K. includes an excellent if disillusioning analysis of the problem (pp. 255–61). But the main focus again falls on myth and ritual as a frame for poetic discourse. Pindar begins by inviting the Tyndaridae (the Dioscuri) to a festival at Acragas, but ends his myth with their arrival, with Heracles, at Olympia (ἐς ταύταν ἑορτάν, 34). We find good discussion of the evidence for theoxenia-type festivals across the Greek world, leading to the conclusion that the song was probably intended for performance at such an occasion. Having explained how Pindar weaves his putative settings at the Acragantine and Olympic festivals into a poetic texture, K. then embarks on a discussion of the ode's myth of Heracles and the Hyperborean olive trees: first with a formal analysis of the narrative, then with close discussion of ritual and mythological parallels. She argues that the story as Pindar presents it was his own creation, but that it is carefully assimilated to long-established patterns of myth and ritual (especially initiation-rites associated with Artemis). It can, she argues, be read simultaneously as an aetiological and an eschatological tale.

In general, one is tempted in a case like this to ask what has changed since the book's first appearance. Certainly, because we think of Greek song less in terms of a single ‘original’ audience, and more in terms of a chain of ‘reperformances’, we are less inclined to read Pindar's allusions to festivals and myths literally. This, however, only complicates the relationship of ‘foreground’ and ‘context’, leaving K.'s myth-ritual analysis unimpaired. But none of this detracts from what K.'s fascinating and provocative book has accomplished, or from the influence it had over subsequent scholarship.