Pindar's poems were commissioned for specific times and places, and they make repeated references to visual markers and material culture, both real and imagined. Pindar conceptualises and evokes the performance context and setting around which the song is taking place. For primary audiences, later audiences and subsequent readers Pindar can create a dazzling spectacle that is simultaneously general and specific as he, the composer, creates and projects a song that is both epichoric and Panhellenic. This co-authored monograph by N. and K. is about how the Greeks understood relations of nearness and distance through art, architecture and song with the works of Pindar as the unifying component. N. and K. use their approach of ‘lyric archaeology’, which is ‘a synthesis of archaeological and epigraphic corpora with the reading habits of lyric and art history’ (p. 1), to offer a close analysis of several Pindaric songs and associated sites of performance and their mutual articulations of time and space.
The book consists of eight chapters grouped into three parts. The horizons of space widen as each part progresses, and within each part the examples become more complex. Part 1 (Chapters 1–4) examines micro-environments and localities; Part 2 (Chapters 5–6) is about the polis and territory of Cyrene; and Part 3 (Chapters 7–8) is about the trans-regional kosmos of the Deinomenid tyrants of Sicily. These chapters are followed by a coda, an appendix, 85 pages of endnotes and the bibliography.
The first half of the introduction is unclear; Chapters 1 and 2 explain the same topics better. The second half of the introduction (‘the prospectus’) is clearer on the aims and approaches. Chapter 1 is about how Greeks in the first half of the fifth century bc understood space and time and choral song in performance, and how ancient concepts of distance can subsume time as well as space. It shows how it was possible to map out the world without precise or universally used systems of measurement and, by contrast, how song with its metre, structure and choreography could orientate that world.
Chapter 2 moves on to how sculptors ‘embed’ their works in public spaces through pose, narrative and aglaia, and how it relates to the viewer. It looks at how choral lyric in performance could complement and work with sculpture and architecture through the example of singular statues to statue groups in a space at Miletus, to the movement of a choral procession from one place to another passing by a series of statues and statue groups at Didyma (G.B. D'Alessio, ‘Didymean Songs (on SEG 58.1301, 60.1150)’, MD 76 [2016], 197–212, is not in the bibliography).
Chapter 3 looks at those corresponding effects in Pindar and how he embeds statues, votives and other numinous/devotional objects into his songs. N. and K. use Nemean 10 and Pythian 5 to show how song and agalmata and votive gifts organise micro-environments; then Olympian 7 as a dedication and inscription, and finally Isthmian 4 and Nemean 3 for the maximal spread of light and how they ‘narrativise’ agalmata and radiance. The connecting thread is light imagery and how the song magnifies the reach and scope of their own radiance to bring together multiple locations.
Chapter 4 examines a fragment of a dithyramb for Athens (75 S.-M.). N. and K. reaffirm, based on a reassessment of the latest archaeological evidence and C. Schnurr's 1995 proposal, that Pindar's omphalos (75.3 S.-M.) corresponds to the Altar of the Twelve Gods, but that the altar was in the archaic agora at the east end of the Acropolis. N. and K. use this argument to further fix the poem within the cityscape of the archaic agora as the chorus dances around the altar and makes reference to local monuments; for example, ‘from Zeus’ (75.7 S.-M.) refers to the chorus dance starting from the Olympeion, east of the Altar.
Part 2 moves onto Cyrene. Chapter 5 focuses on Pythians 9 and 5, on how Pindar orientates the spectators in the town. Rightly, N. and K. treat the poems separately, rather than as a single synthetic account of Cyrenean space and politics to show the different ideologies of foundation myths (aristocratic and royal perspectives in Pyth. 9 and 5 respectively) mapped on the ground in the urban layout. Chapter 6 demonstrates how Pythian 5 inscribes the Battiad kingship onto the urban topography. These two chapters explore tensions between aristocracy and monarchy as reflected in the design and positioning of urban monuments, and the pattern of dedications both at home and abroad.
Part 3 is on the representation of larger trans-regional spaces in Olympian 6. Chapter 7 focuses on architectural and topographical imagery and on descriptions of the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, the Peloponnese and the journey to Syracuse. N. and K. explore the articulation of a Deinomenid kosmos that forms a supra-political and trans-regional system, so that the distance between Sicily and the Peloponnese can at times be vast and at other times negligible. Deinomenid rule in Sicily was noted for displacing populations, absorbing states and fostering migration. N. and K. show how the peoples under Deinomenid rule became inhabitants of a sort of non-place, where ethnic, civic or regional associations and differences are constitutively ironic or facile within a rhetorical scheme that transcends regional differences. N. and K. also propose (p. 239) Olympia as another venue for the performance of Olympian 6 and that the first triad was detachable (p. 250).
Chapter 8 is on hodological imagery and how it links Pindar's poetic output to the source and reach of Deinomenid power, with Hieron as the centre. Olympian 6 works with Deinomenid dedications at Panhellenic centres to create a vast, yet discontinuous, space of power, where mobile populations prioritise territory and any ethnic affiliation is fluid, even ironised (p. 278). The coda proposes that future research should follow N. and K.'s approach. The appendix reaffirms the dating of the porch of the Geloan treasury at Olympia to the 470s bc, using comparative evidence from the Greek West.
N. and K. rightly acknowledge that Pindar's epinikia are the more concrete examples; yet ‘towards’ in the title invites us to consider what further work could be undertaken, despite the lacunose nature of other Pindaric and lyric song. While N. and K. analyse 75 S.-M., an indirectly transmitted fragment, Pindar's paeans are mostly preserved on papyri. The opening of Paean 6 references the Kastalian spring and the surroundings of Delphi; in Paean 7, performed at the Ptoion near Thebes, the chorus seems to be processing towards a shrine of Apollo across mountains and the countryside; Paean 8 told of the construction of the second and third temples at Delphi; and Paean 12, a paian or prosodion perhaps composed for the Naxians, describes the arrival of the theôria at Delos.
Recent excavations on the island of Despotiko just off Antiparos, which was part of Greater Paros in antiquity, have unearthed a temple to Apollo and Artemis. This temple would seem to be the likeliest performance venue for a Pindaric cult-song for the Parians (140a S.-M.). The poem refers to the foundation of an altar to Delian Apollo and Zeus by Heracles after crossing an isthmus on Paros. No suitable isthmus could be located on Paros, but an isthmus had connected Despotiko and Antiparos, and the temple faces towards the isthmus (see Z. Papadopoulou, ‘Παριακά’, ΗΟΡΟΣ 22–5 [2010–13], 403–18).
Minora: the quotes of M. Foucault are unnecessary (pp. 1, 225); the lack of italics for titles of Pindar's works is not good on the eye; a glossary of essential terms would have been useful (e.g. ‘imbricage’, ‘sensorium’ and ‘syntagmatic’) although N. and K. state that they have tried to avoid technical vocabulary (p. 3).
N. and K.'s collaborative research, tempered by classroom dissemination, is the sort of interdisciplinarity one would like to see more of. Their analysis of Cyrene is one of the most enriching discussions of Pindar's odes, and my knowledge and understanding of the site has been vastly improved. The production values for this book are high: the colour images, diagrams and maps are very clear and useful. The book's structure and signposting, and N. and K.'s deployment of increasingly complex examples as each chapter and part progresses, greatly help the reader to follow the argument and the journeys that N. and K. take us on across time and space.
