Even if there are many Schrullen (as Hermann Fränkel called some accounts found in ancient commentaries) told about Pindar and his epinician odes in the scholia, most of them resulting from the scholiasts’ tendency to believe in the presence of the biographical elements in the poems, it is obvious that we should not discount this material in the debate concerning the interpretation of Pindar's poetry itself or of ancient scholarship related to it.Footnote ¹ Apart from the fact that the corpus of scholia Pindarica we now possess reflects to a considerable degree the principles of Alexandrian reading and research on this poet and his works, the scholiasts who compiled previous exegetical material – though they often did so uncritically, subjectively or even capriciously – were first of all, as Mary Lefkowitz has aptly reminded us, native speakers with access to literary works we cannot read.Footnote ² Scholia vetera which incorporate passages by Aristarchus, Didymus and other Alexandrian scholars, as well as recentiora which preserved the remains of ancient material, are of crucial importance not only for our knowledge of the goals and methods of early interpretation of the Theban poet's production, but also for our general understanding of interpretative strategies employed by ancient critics.Footnote ³

In what follows I am going to examine in detail the scholia on Olympian 6.88 which give the interpretation of what Pindar's address to a certain Aeneas, who is taking the poet's song to Stymphalus where it will be sung in Pindar's own absence, might mean.Footnote ⁴ I will try to show how the scholiasts’ way of understanding the passage from the last strophe of Olympian 6 (lines 87–91), influenced by the Alexandrian notion of Pindaric aesthetics, results in a biographical fiction, i.e. the characterisation of the poet as ἰσχνόφωνος.Footnote ⁵

Unlike the recent crop of commentaries on Olympian 6 and not infrequent contemporary debates on the meaning of lines 87–91, modern interpretations of the scholia on the passage about Aeneas’ assignment are few and selective, mostly occurring in discussions of how the song was performed.Footnote ⁶ Scholiasts explain that Aeneas was the chorus trainer. In the scholia BCDEQ (148a = i.186.20ff. Drachmann) we read:

In the account of scholion A (149a = i.188.6ff. Drachmann) we find the explanation:

And in the view of the recentiora (149 Abel):

All scholiasts unanimously emphasise – without, however, specifying the source of this information – that Aeneas was χοροδιδάσκαλος, the trainer of the chorus.Footnote ⁷ Pietro Giannini points out that the scholia vetera use two different forms of the verb χράομαι to refer to the connection between Pindar and Aeneas (ἐχρῆτο and ἐχρήσατο), which make the question of its duration hardly resolvable.Footnote ⁸ Aeneas must have been a Boeotian since the poet seems to suggest that the pig slur, which he shrilly opposed within the ode, also applies to Aeneas.Footnote ⁹

The scholiasts argue that what prevented Pindar from personally training the chorus for the Stymphalian performance was his speech impediment.Footnote ¹⁰ They use the adjective ἰσχνόφωνος to describe a feature of Pindar's voice. The author of scholion 148a must have associated its meaning with an inability to speak loudly enough, since he juxtaposed Pindar who was ἰσχνόφωνος with the majority of poets who were μεγαλόφωνοι, i.e. loud-voiced and with no problems in coaching the singers.Footnote ¹¹ However, the view of scholion 148a is not that of scholion 149a: in the Ambrosian scholion (149a) Pindar is also called ἰσχνόφωνος, but this term is not opposed here to μεγαλόφωνοι, and besides the account includes the idea of the poet's competing, as well as training the performers. The Byzantine scholiast (149) limits himself to the vague and enigmatic statement that Pindar was not able to speak properly (μὴ δύνασθαι λέγειν ἀξίως).

It seems that the scholiasts’ general tendency to trace biographical significance in the reports of ancient critics about the qualities of Pindar's poems might have contributed to their constructing their account of the poet's ἰσχνοφωνία. Although Pindar's famous grandiloquence, frequently mentioned by other poets and prose writers, refers to the style of his thunderous songs, the poet himself must also have been thought loud-voiced in some sense in ancient tradition, which prevented people from understanding ἰσχνόφωνος as ‘weak-voiced’. The conviction that Pindar must have been grandiloquent seems to be the main reason to think that the story about his ἰσχνοφωνία was initially not about the weakness of his voice, but about him stuttering. We may therefore ask what kind of considerations determined the creation of such an image of Pindar.

In the case of Pindar the biographical detail concerning his being ἰσχνόφωνος may have arisen as pure invention from combining some ancient specialists’ judgements about articulation of sounds with the Alexandrians’ and later critics’ approach towards the unity of Pindar's epinician poems. Although theorists in the field of rhetoric make explicit the connection between ἰσχνός and style, scholiasts’ choice of the description of Pindar's peculiarity, which fails to conform to ancient ideas about what is quintessentially Pindaric in respect to the style of his poetry, must refer to something other than the weakness of his voice.Footnote ¹² It does not seem unreasonable to suspect that the notion of continuity (συνέχεια) referred to by ancient authors when defining someone's way of producing sounds might have been associated by the scholiast also with the concept of coherence – the narrative or thematic integration, or unity, of a literary work. Although the Pindaric scholia themselves do not provide explicit evidence of using the stem συνεχής to point to the ‘coherence’ of the poems’ composition, such a meaning occurs in post-classical criticism and seems to underscore the coherence or appropriate order of an artistic text.Footnote ¹³ The term συνεχής was chosen by Eustathius in his commentary to the Iliad with reference to the ‘connected’ exposition of the Iliad despite the principle of ποικιλία observed in the presentation of individual segments; Dio Chrysostom also calls the Homeric narrative συνεχῆ ποίησιν.Footnote ¹⁴ And Porphyry explains – commenting on Aristotle's Categories – that the philosopher placed his considerations devoted to homonomy, synonymy and paronomy in the introduction to the work in order not to break the coherence of the discourse (ἵνα μὴ … διακόπτοι τὸ συνεχές) with the digressions.Footnote ¹⁵ The opposition of συνεχής and παρέκβασις (digression) in characterising poetic narratives can also be found in the papyrus fragment SH 339A, which discusses the style of Apollonius, Cleo of Curium and Dionysius Scytobrachion.Footnote ¹⁶

The problem of thematic integration and artistic unity in literary productions, which occupied an important position in ancient literary criticism, was also noticed by Pindar's readers and vividly discussed by his ancient commentators.Footnote ¹⁷ As has been rightly pointed out by the scholars who examined the exegetical scholia to Pindar, the fact that his epinician poetry was regarded among the ancients as an unattainable ideal of a grand-scale work and a proof of inimitable divine talent did not stop commentators from searching for inconsistencies in the treatment of a given subject, incorrectness (in their opinion) of word-combinations and topical allusions, or unintelligibility.Footnote ¹⁸ Such attempts, generally negative in tone, to identify the characteristic ingredients of Pindaric odes, which were thought of as the deviations from normal or standard usage, arose due to looking at the encomiastic pieces of the Theban poet from the angle of epideictic oratory, which dominated post-classical poetic theory.Footnote ¹⁹ It does not seem improbable that the very characteristic feature of Pindar's epinicians, that is the tendency to use digressions which could lead the reader away from the coherence of the ode and cause the impression of a lack of narrative continuity, was mistakenly understood by the scholiast, obsessed with a search for biographical tracks in Pindar's poems, in terms of the poet's physical defect.Footnote ²⁰ As a result an amazing story was invented, which did not fit in with other elements of Pindar's artistic reputation: he was a stammerer (ἰσχνόφωνος) and was not able to perform his duties as chorus trainer.

Although the Pindaric scholia do not explicitly mention stammering (ἰσχνοφωνία) as a phenomenon comparable or analogous to using digressions in victory odes, the digressions seem in fact to be conceptualised ambiguously in the scholia. In short, reading the scholia sometimes gives the impression of praise of παρεκβάσεις, sometimes of their blame. In the former case the poet's decision to introduce digressions is connected with a superabundance of poetic resources at his disposal and the poet's way of utilising it.Footnote ²¹ In the latter case there may be, in the commentators’ opinion, something suspect about the poet's ability to compose properly.Footnote ²²

In view of the scholiasts’ unreflecting practice of mixing up things and confusing facts,Footnote ²³ it is not impossible that the meaning of the adjective ἰσχνόφωνος recurring in the scholia with reference to Pindar went beyond the traditional ‘weak-voiced’ and could express the idea of ‘stammering’. A parallel from the Pindaric scholia of such a meaning of ἰσχνόφωνος is scholion inscr. b to Pythian 4 (ii.93.18 Drachmann), where this adjective is evidently used to explain the sense of the name of Battus, the founder of Cyrene, similarly to what Herodotus (4.155) and Acesandrus (FGrHist 469 F 6) say about its meaning:Footnote ²⁴

The evidence for the significance of ‘the lack of continuity’ of the word ἰσχνοφωνία appears in some passages from the Problems ascribed to Aristotle, where ἰσχνοφωνία is the common designation for stammering defined as οὐδὲν ἢ οὐ συνεχῶς διεξιέναι, ‘nothing other than the inability to give an account continuously’.Footnote ²⁵ The ability to speak continuously, i.e. to utter words or their parts without any breaks, is extensively discussed by the authors of the Problems, first of all as an issue of speech physiology.Footnote ²⁶ ἰσχνοφωνία was metaphorically referred to by Alcidamas (fourth century BCE), who compares a man unable to speak extempore to those who stammer (μηδὲν … διαφέρειν τῶν ἰσχνοφώνων, fr. 16 Muir).Footnote ²⁷ Pausimachus of Miletus, an exponent of the euphonist tradition who had lived probably around 200 BCE, and who was criticised by Philodemus while discussing ἰσχνοφωνία in his On Poems, said that an ἰσχνόφωνος would not be a good poet (οὐκ ἔσεσθαι τὸν ἰσχνόφωνον ἀγαθὸν ποιητήν, in Phld. Poem. 96.4–5).Footnote ²⁸ The lack of continuity in the act of producing sounds becomes, according to the ancient thinkers, a defect which makes it impossible for a man to communicate with others by live words.

As Tom Phillips has recently reminded us, the purely fictional elements in the biographical traditions about Greek poets provide various insights into how they were understood in particular contexts.Footnote ²⁹ It seems therefore that our biographical statement may also have grown around a feature noticeable in Pindar's poems, namely the digressive structure of the epinician odes: turning aside the main subject or course of thoughts of the poem might have been associated with stammering, i.e. ‘speaking with breaks’ (discontinuously). Although our information about the emergence and development of such an analogy is too scanty to definitively support or rule out this possibility, the mechanism of inventing the story seems comparable to that of thinking up the account concerning Philitas’ extraordinary physical slightness which necessitated his wearing weights on his feet in strong winds, which was nothing more than transferring the principle of λεπτότης (‘slightness’), a characteristic feature of his poetry, onto his biography.Footnote ³⁰ Additionally, this story about the voice of Pindar seems to have much in common with a rich anecdotal tradition about the inadequate voice of famous writers. Namely, some ancient commentators (such as the author of scholion 148a) seem to have thought of Pindar as one of those well-known authorities in the field of wisdom or leading lights of literature whose weakness of voice was a relatively stable and lasting feature of their legendary representations (as in the case of Sophocles, Isocrates, Demosthenes or Aristotle).Footnote ³¹ On the one hand such an explanation can be treated as a stunning counterbalance to the story about ‘honey-tongued’ Pindar and his Dichterweihe outlined in the Vita Pindari.Footnote ³² On the other it is, in a way, compatible with the story preserved in the collection of Pindar's apophthegmata telling how Pindar, when asked why, though a poet, he was not able to sing, compared himself to a ship builder who constructs rudders but does not know how to steer.Footnote ³³

To conclude, the claim of some scholiasts (such as the author of scholion 149a) that Pindar was ἰσχνόφωνος meant that he was believed to be a stammerer rather than a weak-voiced person. One possible explanation of why the scholia describe Pindar as ἰσχνόφωνος might be that it is the result of overlapping twoFootnote ³⁴ known meanings of the expression οὐ συνεχής, which can be understood, depending on the context, as ‘lacking continuity’ in the act of articulating sounds, as well as ‘lacking continuity’ in telling a story or conducting poetic narrative. The above-presented discussion concerning the meaning of the ἰσχνόφωνος in the scholia on O. 6.88 should make us cautious in any attempt to adopt a biographical approach when interpreting the scholiasts’ report on Pindar's ἰσχνoφωνία.Footnote ³⁵