Performing Exemplarity

Pindar constructs his victory odes to reach out beyond the particulars most salient to the local audiences at each premiere, beyond the particular here and now.Footnote ² As a traveling poet born and based in Thebes, he navigates astutely between his own native identity and that of the athletic victor whom he is commissioned to extol. First performed at a public event within a geographically restricted community that included the victor, his relatives, and the fellow citizens attending the public premiere, the victory odes could subsequently circulate beyond that local community. Thus there were two types of activity: public performance and the circulation of a script (Hubbard Reference Hubbard1985).Footnote ³ Even readers, remote in time and space, can to some degree imaginatively identify with the original audiences and understand the odes in their original settings. They can strive to emulate the activities of exemplary figures, both mythological and contemporary, whose efforts transcend the limits of the human condition through the practice of aretê ‘excellence’ or ‘virtue’. Far from narrowly focusing on elite athletic competitions, the rhetoric of each ode encourages all interpreters, by practicing excellence, to experience in their own lives “a gleam of splendor given of heaven” (Pythian 8.98).

Pindaric odes invite listeners to join an elite category of savvy interpreters who listen or read virtuously, with aretê, and who discern the complex and subtle meanings of his notoriously difficult poetry.Footnote ⁴ The savvy interpreters whom Pindar imagines and occasionally calls “wise” or “discerning” (line 86: συνετοῖσιν) are not individuals or groups that he could possibly preselect;Footnote ⁵ rather, his odes themselves help “train” all inherently competent and receptive members of his audiences and readership to join a community of excellence that transcends time and space. They do so, in part, through the exemplary activities of ego. Thus, despite the fact that the odes came into existence to satisfy wealthy patrons from around the Greek-speaking world and that the poet Pindar presents his projected self, his ego, as someone engaged in the economy of aristocratic gift exchange,Footnote ⁶ this wider community of interpreters is not “gated,” that is, not restricted to interpreters within aristocratic lineages. The odes welcome anyone who combines “natural talent” (phua) with “hard work” (ponos), especially under the tutelage of an expert guide.

Fränkel describes Pindar’s world of universal values, the Wertwelt that the poet creates when praising the victor’s momentary and transitory heroism: “Pindar’s poetry is concerned with the noble, the great, the good, and the godly/divine—in a single word, with value; and indeed so exclusively that everything is ignored that has no positive or negative connection to values.”Footnote ⁷ Other scholars since Fränkel have tried to explain the far-reaching appeal of these praise poems beyond the original occasion of their first performance. Kathryn Morgan, for example, attributes to Pindar a “self-sufficient and totalizing poetic discourse that throws the excellence of his song into relief by subsuming all aspects of the present revel, the poetry of the past, and the performative context of the future” (Reference Morgan1993, 14–15).Footnote ⁸ This discourse, she adds, will absorb all other forms of victory celebration and song. In an inspirational essay, David Young (Reference Young and Luce1982, 161–62) writes,

In semiotic terms, Pindar translates particular “token” victors into general “types” (CP Reference Peirce2.480) by linking the present performance to the mythological past and thereby creating a palette of exemplarity.

As he draws on the world of values—Fränkel’s Wertwelt—Pindar develops elaborate correspondences between and among the activities of characters of the mythical and contemporary worlds. Mythological heroes and heroines populate thirty-seven of the forty-five epinician odes. They exist alongside the victor, his immediate family and his illustrious ancestors and alongside the figure of the poet himself, invoked by the first person pronoun, ego. Mythical and contemporary characters who transgress or fall short of excellence also populate the odes, highlighting, by contrast, the excellence of those who succeed. Triumphs in multiple domains, including the composition of victory odes in the language-based sphere of making poetry, become metaphors for one another and lead, on the basis of this parallelism of athletic and poetic prowess, to important generalizations and abstractions. When ego utters the embedded exemplary maxims, he seems to stand on a higher plane, from which he is able to see patterns governing humankind. This constitutes one Pindaric strategy for inviting interpreters to appropriate moral lessons and overcome comparable challenges and obstacles in their own particular domains and sphere.

The odes have the power to inculcate heroic (both athletic and poetic) values in all willing receivers and thus to become public, just like acclaim won by victors at the four Panhellenic games held at Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, and the Isthmus. Fundamentally invitational, these stories of triumph and failure are accessible to those who can absorb the generalizations into their own conceptual and experiential framework. These values are not a closed set that one can simply list; they help define the optimal human life, given that mortals are, in Pindar’s words, “creatures for a day” (Pythian 8.95–100):

Textual Modalities and Their Construction

It is useful to distinguish five textual modalities, or ways of being texts, in Pindar’s victory odes based on a combination of features intersecting at different semiotic levels. Criteria for differentiating these textual modalities include: the nature of their extratextual historical references, the selection and combination of foregrounded deictic devices (especially the relative location of the poetic ego and the deictic anchor or origo), the characteristic poetic or metrical style, the typical position within the rhetorical flow of the poem (e.g., prologue, digression, transition, conclusion), the severity of the interpretive demands placed on the audience, and their “ontological” status as text (e.g., as performed, as quoted, as replicated, or as projected into the future). In some cases these modalities occupy clearly segmentable parts of the ode, but Pindar frequently makes this segmentability extremely opaque.Footnote ⁹ The following five modalities will be useful in the analyses below: (1) the “narrator’s text” anchored by reference to Pindar’s home city of Thebes and to the poetic ego; (2) the “victor’s text” relating to the victor’s athletic triumph and the subsequent celebration in the victory’s home city; (3) the “mythological text” fashioned by the poet out of tradition to provide models or exempla, frequently placed in parallels or sequences, and often requiring esoteric or specialized knowledge; (4) the “gnomic text” (gnomai) stating or alluding to some general universalizing moral principle or maxim that the poet intends to apply to the “participants in the performance of the song in which they occur” (Wells, Reference Wells2009, 68);Footnote ¹⁰ and (5) the overarching “metapragmatic text” intended by the poet to be, ideally, constructible by original and future audiences whose achieved understanding of the poem as a work of verbal art is the key to its accomplishing its praise function.Footnote ¹¹

It is important to think of these five textual modalities as essentially pragmatically constructed, or entextualized, discourse and not as segmentable parts of the odes as they are printed today nor as conventionally attested speech acts definable by a degree of coherence between the poet’s metalanguage and some assumed linguistic function.Footnote ¹² Rather, the concept of modalities is designed to identify the distinct components that the poet defines, instructs, and challenges the hearers to integrate into a comprehensive reading or interpretation of the ode as performed, not just as a (potentially) diagrammable structure (e.g., a ring structure) but as a pragmatic artefact, one that demands “recontextualization” as an essential feature of its structure. In other words, textual modalities are the building blocks (1 through 4) and the final interpretant (5) of what savvy interpreters do.

Nearly all Pindaric victory odes celebrate historic victors in a variety of athletic events held at one of the four Panhellenic games.Footnote ¹³ Competitors came from all over Greece to compete in the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games, even from as far away as the Greek-colonized island of Sicily and from colonies in southern Italy and North Africa. Each ode premiered in live performance, most often soon after the victor’s return to his homeland from the Games. A chorus usually of fellow citizens,Footnote ¹⁴ often trained by Pindar himself, who would have traveled to the performance site, or by a surrogate,Footnote ¹⁵ would sing and dance its words and rhythms, accompanied by music. The “narrative” and “victor” textual modalities of the odes usually contain materials carefully selected from an array of historical referents or happenings in the real world, although, like the historian, the poet is not constrained to follow a linear sequence that reflects either historical chronology or causation The seven most salient features of these two constructed modalities are (1) an athlete wins at a Panhellenic game; (2) the athlete or a member of his family commissions Pindar to celebrate the victory with an ode (chreos [the poet’s] ‘task or obligation’); (3) to complete his task and fulfill his obligation, the poet finds inspiration, usually in his native town of Thebes; (4) the poet composes his epinikion, pays a chorus to perform it, and may direct its performance (certainly, if the site is in his native land); (5) the poet exports/sends/accompanies his completed ode to its destination (journey); (6) a chorus of citizens from the victor’s homeland performs the ode in song and dance; and (7) the poet and victor, and their respective homelands, win lasting kleos, which is reactivated each time the ode is reperformed or eventually read and reread. These privileged or selected events often appear discontinuously, leaving gaps to be filled in by the interpreter.

Capable interpreters who are knowledgeable about the features that anchor and define the epinician genre can construct, as the first approximation of the ultimate “metapragmatic text,” a sequential storyline having its own narrative logic and starring its character-narrator, ego. It begins with the athletic victory and includes the composition and performance of the victory ode and a nod to its final outcome, namely the acquisition of lasting glory. Note, crucially, that the narrative description (to the degree provided explicitly by the poet) and the audience’s coherent understanding (given their newly acquired skill) both construct the ideal pragmatic trajectory of this genre, which is itself a necessary but not sufficient guarantee of the poem’s effectiveness. An ability to construct this storyline is, additionally, a prerequisite for admission into the virtual community of savvy interpreters of Pindaric verse. But savvy interpretation, as we will see, requires much more integrative skill at the level of narrative;Footnote ¹⁶ that is, the interpreter must ascend the heights with the Pindaric ego and view his or her own activity with a god’s eye view, to the extent possible.

We will show below how, by constructing a coherent text integrating all these modalities, interpreters first gain access to one victorious story of talent, hard work, and eventual “splendor given of heaven,” and then, by identifying with ego and appropriating his insights, they reframe what is useful and possibly universal in his enactment of poetic triumph, that is, the poem understood in its fullest pragmatics. Moreover, by prompting interpreters to engage with his odes and to overcome comparable challenges and obstacles in their own particular domains and spheres, ego in a sense ensures his own perpetuity.

In sum, Pindar’s victory odes provide an optimistic and aesthetically satisfying closure to challenging endeavors. Though composed to celebrate specific victors at a specific time, they uplift and transport interpreters and impart timeless wisdom.Footnote ¹⁷ In addition, readers’ difficulty in understanding a Pindaric ode can be seen as itself an “athletic” struggle, itself requiring aretê and deserving of praise.

The Poetics of Deixis

Having established the overall pragmatic challenges for interpreting Pindaric odes, we need now to pinpoint at a more technical level the essential role of deixis in Pindar’s poetic technique—without losing sight of the more general goal of linking these “here and now” anchors to Pindar’s quest for far more universalizing textual trajectory. In particular we will be concerned with Pindar’s manipulation of the poetic ego (especially fundamental to the narrator’s text) and with the various ways he engages with his audience in the mutual task of linking the victor’s text to the more illusory mythological text and still more puzzling gnomic text.Footnote ¹⁸

We can define deixis (< deiknumi ‘point to or at’) as “the relation of reference to the point of origin of the utterance” (Grundy Reference Grundy2000, 22), expressed in terms of person, space, and time. The coincidence of I-here-now creates a center of energy, called an origo, or deictic center, that listeners or readers can occupy as they experience a prolonged moment of engagement.Footnote ¹⁹ The study of deixis in literary texts received impetus from Bühler’s distinction between “ocular deixis” (demonstratio ad oculos) and “imagination-oriented” deixis (deixis am Phantasma).Footnote ²⁰ Ocular deixis, that is, straightforward visual pointing, is most familiar in oral contexts, while imagination-oriented deixis, that is, pointing to (or speaking of) an imagined object in, for example, a fictional universe, has the surprising effect of bringing that object into existence in an interpreter’s mind’s eye. Deictic reference is, thus, fundamentally egocentric. As a consequence, to disambiguate deictics requires that one identify the origo of the speaker, whether for an oral or a written utterance, by recognizing his or her spatio-temporal coordinates. In the case of Pindar’s performance poetry, because we have lost the full context, all non-original interpreters have to construct an imaginary situation of utterance wherein deictic expressions are anchored in relation to a fictional speaker, ego (Semino Reference Semino1992).

In narratological terms, deixis depends on a primary narrator-focalizer, that is, a figure who sees and narrates.Footnote ²¹ Interpreters accompanying that figure, wherever he travels, sometimes experience a full “vicarious transport,” sometimes a mere shift in orientation.Footnote ²² In Pindaric victory odes, the poet locates the primary origo with ego most explicitly in the modality we are calling the narrator’s text, speak using “proximal deixis” (relatively near to the speaker) in designating the coordinates of space and time in which ego operates. In the modality we are calling the victor’s text, he uses “distal deixis” (relatively far from speaker) for recounting the victor’s achievement in the third person and as a past event, even though at the premiere he and the victor regularly occupy the same space and time. He places the exploits of mythical heroes at a further remove from the origo, in the distant past; and yet, by design, these heroes often occupy the same space as the site of the premiere in the victor’s homeland.

To illustrate Pindar’s use of poetic deixis, we turn to epinician myth, which sometimes includes quoted prayers, prophecies, or exchanges between characters. In mythical exchanges we find full speech contexts, with a full set of mythical speakers and addressees, along with an audience of onlookers. Under such circumstances, the deictic pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs are fully intelligible and transparent, and so an analysis of these features in the mythological text helps us understand the workings of deixis in the more fragmentary, more disjointed narrative of the victor’s text.Footnote ²³

In a passage from Isthmian 6, for example, Herakles, clad in a lion’s skin, arrives at King Telamon’s wedding banquet. There, in the presence of his host and an assemblage of banqueters, he prays that Telamon and his bride will have a son (44–47):

This passage illustrates Pindar’s use of ocular deixis, as Herakles points to the time (“now”) and the addressee (“you” [Zeus]) and designates his host (“this man here”) and the lion skin (“this pelt”). The host and the pelt are visible to the audience at the banquet. For savvy interpreters, once they reimagine this contextualized speech act, the deictic system is indeed intelligible and transparent.

Another, quite different example of secondary deixis comes from the epinician myth found in Olympian 1.25–88. Pelops, a youth who has recently been returned to earth by Poseidon after his father’s transgression, is about to compete in a chariot race for the hand of Hippodameia. He asks his divine patron for the swiftest of all chariots. In his prayer, Pelops delivers a maxim about heroic action and then applies it to himself:

Pelops’s self-exhortation, ego tells us, was not without effect: he won the race and the bride. As an epinician mythical speaker, Pelops, like ego, uses language efficaciously: after he changes direction and takes up the task, he gets immediate results. (This example will be revisited in our discussion below of Pythian 3.)

We have discussed the fundamental egocentricity of all first person narrations and the need for interpreters to reimagine the situation of utterance where the deictic expressions are anchored to the fictional speaker. In Pindaric epinicians, the first person pronoun implicitly or explicitly refers to “I, Pindar of Thebes,” the creator of the verse, but can also refer to members of the chorus as they perform the ode and utter the word ego (Felson Reference Felson1999, Reference Felson2004a; Bonifazi Reference Bonifazi2004a; Bakker Reference Bakker2010). We can consider this a form of “staging” (D’Alessio Reference D’Alessio1994, 279). Each time a trained chorus performs impersonating ego, they reactivate the composition story. Within a single ode, Pindar makes the poet salient at one moment, the chorus at the next; but he keeps the less salient referent of ego nonetheless present in the background. Paradoxically, the authorial identification of ego does not detract from the perception at the premiere that first person references point as well to the bodies, ad oculos, of the citizen performers. In a sense, Pindar is offering a puzzle to his interpreters whenever a chorus performing the ode utters “I.” Savvy interpreters can, of course, experience this sleight of hand as a source of interpretive pleasure.Footnote ²⁴

Pindar offers, in both narrator’s modality and in the victor’s modality, the deictic construction of ego as a paradigm for other achievements, both athletic and heroic. At other times he animates distant mythical triumphs and catastrophes and invites interpreters to draw inferences by analogy. And through gnomic maxims that impart nuggets of aristocratic wisdom—values like “don’t strive to be Zeus,” “don’t stay at home by your mother’s side,” “be among the front runners,” “avoid excess,” “practice moderation”—he further generalizes and even universalizes these mythical lives. In so doing, he sometimes places ego on a higher plane than the other characters, surveying space and time from above, as if from the vantage point of the Olympian gods. At such moments, ego assumes “a god’s eye view,” from which he exhibits impartial, prophetic vision, based on his broad knowledge of life stories that have occurred and are occurring across space and time. These glimpses from above help transform time-bound events into a timeless narrative that will win everlasting fame (kleos) for the victor and the poet.

The important point to note is that Pindar uses a full range of similar deictic techniques, many organized by spatial and temporal oppositions, across the various textual modalities as a unifying poetic device. This is one way that he forges correspondences or parallelisms among the inspired and creative poet, the triumphant and now praised victor, and the exemplary mythological heroes is by emphasizing the homeland of each, a spatially grounded indexical sign of the inhabitants.Footnote ²⁵ While praise of the victor’s homeland is a standard and well-examined feature of every epinician ode, scholars have paid too little attention to the frequent mention of Pindar’s own homeland and of Theban events and themes.Footnote ²⁶ Linking the figure of ego with Thebes reinforces its reference to the poet-creator. “Pindar of Thebes” is an identifiable entity, comparable, say, to real or fictional characters such as Theron of Akragas or Telesikrates of Kyrene or Herakles of Thebes. The particulars of Pindar’s historical identity, as refracted in the ode, do not lessen the possibility of identifying with him; instead, they invite identification: like all of us, he is a person from a specific place.

Robust representations of ego across the various modalities give interpreters the access they need in order to involve themselves in ego’s struggle for victory and acclaim. Egocentric, proximal deixis thus ironically enlarges their horizons and inspires them to want to follow ego’s example and succeed.

The chorus’s impersonation of the poet from Thebes is one kind of imaginative deixis.Footnote ²⁷ Another is what comes across as a pretense, namely, Pindar’s representation of the compositional activities that took place before the performance as if they are happening in the here and now. Pindar seems to stage his songs as impromptu performances. The deictic positioning of ego as he “weaves” his composition gives the illusion of spontaneity, which some scholars have called “pseudo-spontaneity” (Carey Reference Carey1981, 52; Scodel Reference Scodel and Worthington1995) or “oral subterfuge” (Miller Reference Miller1993).Footnote ²⁸ From one point of view, that of the token-level performed text, ego is indeed an extemporizing speaker, creating the illusion of the ode as “emergent.” His discourse includes such features as impulsiveness, digressiveness, false stops and starts, and self-corrections. Of course, members of the audience know the poet has already completed his ode and taught it to a chorus, who are in the process of performing it. But they pretend that he is in the throes of formulating his thoughts and arranging his heterogeneous materials. So, too, do later readers, imagining the ode’s delivery at its premiere. Of course, Pindar, as he composed, perhaps back in Thebes, was savvy enough to anticipate how the text would be perceived at performance and even, most likely, how it would be read in the distant future. By conflating his Theban here and now (D’Alessio’s “coding time”) and the time of performance, he cleverly manipulates these two deictic systems. Hence, there is no disadvantage to using terms like pseudospontaneity or oral subterfuge. This ploy allows Pindar to take his audiences into the creative process of composition, with all its obstacles and triumphs, and to give them an enduring point of access to his eternal themes.Footnote ²⁹

First Case Study: Olympian 3

This ode celebrates the victory of Theron of Akragas, son of Ainesidamos, in a chariot race of 476 BCE.Footnote ³⁰ The three-triad epinikion begins with ego’s wish to please (ἁδεῖν) the Tyndarids—the Dioskouroi Twins, Kastor and Pollux and their sister, Helen—and it returns to the Twins at its conclusion.Footnote ³¹ In it, Pindar ingeniously fashions ego as a savvy interpreter in action and invites his interpreters, emulating ego, to engage in interpretation of a similarly high quality.

In stating his goal of pleasing the Twins and Helen, ego emphasizes poetic innovation, for which he uses two verbs of joining with two sets of direct objects: (1) “as I search out a new-fashioned way to yoke [ἐναρμόξαι] Dorian dance [beat, meter] with voices that celebrate triumph”; (2) “my ritual duty of suitably co-mingling [συμμεῖξαι πρεπόντως] the elegant tones of the lyre with a shout from the pipe and a placement of words in due praise of Ainesidamos’ son!” Innovation, then, with the Muse standing somewhere (ποι) nearby, will determine ego’s success. In the lines quoted above, two hapaxes (one time occurrences), νεοσίγαλον (4) and ἀγλαόκωμον (6), the latter further emphasized through enjambment, imply a positive outcome, as do the intricate parallels to winners. Clearly, to succeed in this ritual task (τοῦτο θεόδματον χρέος, literally, “god-built task”) of praising the victor and perpetuating his renown will require the ultimate poetic skill and technique.

In an interlude (9–13), ego generalizes the practice of crowning victors with an olive wreath and describes how victory odes, epinikia, travel outward from Olympia. The mythological text that follows (13b–38) begins at the end of epode A, with τὰν ποτε (which once), taking us back in time to the founding of the Olympic Games by Herakles, here the son of Amphitryon (13b) and of Zeus (21: πατρὶ and 31: πατρόθεν). His achievements culminate in his final apotheosis and provide a paradigm for all who strive to succeed.

Herakles in the mythic text resembles other triumphant figures in the ode, but particularly Theron and ego, analogies that imply that ego too will succeed in his venture—to complete the ode and please the Tyndarids. Pleasing the Tyndarids may seem like a limited goal, but its prominence aligns ego with Theron and his tribe of Emmenids, who have already earned the Twins’ favor—as demonstrated by their gift of the current victory in a chariot race (38b–39b) and their reciprocal relationship with them (40). It is as if ego, too, about to embark on his own “course around the racetrack,” will reach the finish line and earn his crown.

That the myth demands hard work from interpreters is evident from the extensive scholarship on its problematic passages. Among the various conundrums are the questions of how many trips Herakles made to the land of the Hyperboreans (14) and, if two, why they seem to be conflated into one. Clearly, Herakles takes two journeys, the first in the service of Eurystheus (26b–32), the second self-motivated but beginning “as a mere thought, caught as it flashed through the hero’s mind,” inspired by his recollection of the olives tree he spotted on his first journey. Ego never describes the course of the second; instead, Heracles’s first journey supplies its missing elements. The close formal connection between the two trips requires that interpreters combine the reports and fill in the gaps.

In conflating the two strands of myth, ego bedazzles the interpreter to experience the reduplicated journeys as a single event, with Olympia as the point of departure and of return. Olympia is also the site of the poet’s god-sent songs (θεόμοροι … ἀοιδαί) and the native soil for the adornment of olive placed on the victor’s brow (9b–13b). By metonymy, Olympia links the poet to Herakles, a connection reinforced by the use of θυμός ‘heart’, as the motivator for the hero’s second journey (25) and the poet’s song of praise (38b). Interlocking the two journeys has an additional poetic effect: the textual order of events makes it seem as if Herakles has won the olive trees (31–34) as a prize for outrunning the Hind (25 and 30–32).Footnote ³²

Other sleights of hand present challenges to interpreters. The sudden darting back and forth between the initial and the second trip renders shifts between the two journeys almost imperceptible; but an interpreter can unravel these strands and assign elements either to the first, mandated journey—a Heraklean Labor under the orders of Eurystheus—or to the second, a self-imposed task (χρέος) that his heart set in motion at that very time (25, δή τότ’) when the garden seemed to him defenseless (ἔδοξεν γυμνὸς αὐτῷ) against the sun’s sharp rays.Footnote ³³

Herakles’s remembrance of the olive trees he spotted on his first journey pulls ego and the savvy interpreters to the very place where the hero first encountered and marveled at these trees. The adverb ἔνθα ‘where’ (26), provides the gateway to this change of location and the directional (deictic) verb δέχομαι ‘receive, welcome’, along with ἐλθόντ’ ‘coming’, ‘when he came’, accentuates this new location: “where Leto’s daughter once had received him when he came.” The where clause orients interpreters from the origo at the Ister (Danube). Artemis appears to be welcoming the hero on the second trip, since line 26 follows closely upon Herakles’s focalization at Olympia (24); but, surprisingly, the narrative spins back to the hero’s initial journey, mandated not by his heart (25, θυμός) but under compulsion from his father (28, ἀνάγκα).

Such deictic shifts bring about vicarious transport of ego.Footnote ³⁴ As the myth’s narrator, ego seems to accompany its protagonist twice to the land of the Hyperboreans, to see what Herakles sees and remember what Herakles remembers.Footnote ³⁵ His identification with Herakles as he moves into his space through vicarious transport invites interpreters to participate in the hero’s subjective cognitive activity in that far-off land, along with ego. They too experience the hero’s bold adventure; his ordeal becomes, in a sense, their own.

In Olympian 3 Pindar aligns five ritual events that all provide occasions for interactions between the divine and human worlds: (1) the Games at Olympia founded in Zeus’s honor on the banks of the Alpheus River (19; 21–22); (2) the reenactment of the original event each time the Games are held, each time the Aetolian judge crowns a victor (11; 19–22); (3) the Twins’ preservation of the ancient (Olympic) rites (41: φυλάσσοντες μακάρων τελετάς); (4) Herakles’s and the Twins’ attendance at the festival at Olympia at the time when Herakles appointed them to supervise the Games (36);Footnote ³⁶ and (5) the Twins’ habitual presence (cf. θαμά ‘often’) in Akragas at theoxenia in their honor—that is, at banquets hosted for the gods.

Theoxenia in Akragas attest to the habitual piety of the Emmenids and of Theron in particular. We cannot assume that a theoxenion in Akragas was literally the setting for the premiere, since there is no trace of deictic markers pointing to such an event at Akragas in the here and now (Krummen Reference Krummen[1990] 2014, 253–61).Footnote ³⁷ Instead, we take the poem’s language of hosting gods at a theoxenion as a metaphor that makes the audiences imagine a first performance at a theoxeny and that captures the intimacy and reciprocity between striving humans and the powers that be, intimacy that enables an athlete, hero, or poet to succeed.

Coming full thematic circle, the ode for Theron ends with a return to the here and now of ego’s ongoing poetic task, with the implication that the Twins, who honored Theron by delivering the Olympic victory in the four-horse chariot race to him (38–40), will favor ego as well. To satisfy the Twins and promote the success of this epinikion, Pindar has ego both state and practice the principle of “nothing too much”:

The maxim warns all interpreters, and ego himself, not to go too far, not to exceed the Pillars of Herakles, an extreme terminus, the outermost limits of the known world. Though ego is always at risk of misusing his poetic talent (τέχνη), his ensuing “action” puts into practice exemplary poetic behavior that avoids hubris. Like Theron, who grasps the Pillars of Herakles “from his home” (οἴκοθεν), ego ends his epinikion just in time and thereby becomes the very model of self-restraint. Thus he demonstrates that, having understood the maxim, he has complied with the principle that travel beyond the Pillars of Herakles is forbidden (literally, ἄβατον ‘impassable’) for the wise and the unwise.Footnote ³⁸ Pindar has fulfilled his ritual obligation (11) and the Muse indeed has stood beside him as he invented (6–7). Like the successful travelers Herakles and Theron, he completes his poetic journey and thematically returns home. He pushes limits, goes from center to periphery, nearly transgresses but finally stops short.Footnote ³⁹ He uses his own poetic journey to provide an additional and especially vivid paradigm of “not staying at home” but instead venturing out as a hero, to the benefit of his immediate audiences and future readers. The fact that he travels to a limit and not beyond will resonate, as we shall see below, with the counterfactuals of Pythian 3.

Second Case Study: Pythian 3

Pythian 3 celebrates the victory of Hieron of Syracuse in a single horse race, the κελῆς, of 478 or 476 BCE.Footnote ⁴⁰ In it, Pindar consoles Hieron who is suffering from an illness, probably gallstones.Footnote ⁴¹ The substantial composition narrative of Pythian 3 invites the interpreter to draw analogies between ego, the victor, and the hero Herakles, whose two round-trip journeys between Olympia and the northernmost land of the Hyperboreans, signified by the Ister (Danube) River, provide a paradigm for other journeys in the composition narrative: of the victor, the poet, and even the crown of olive.

The ode is an atypical epinikion, since there is no mention of a commission, the poet’s task, the ode’s reception and performance, or lasting glory (kleos); its content and metrical form imply that it was sent to be publicly performed at the Syracusan palace.Footnote ⁴² Yet the narrator’s text once again features ego developing into an exemplary figure, worthy of emulation, but in stark contrast to ego’s behavior in Olympian 3, in Pythian 3 he remains situated at Thebes, unable, for unspecified reasons, to journey to Syracuse, homeland of the victorious equestrian, Hieron.

Through a variety of complex compositional strategies, ego undergoes a change of state that happens in spurts in the course of the poem. Triggering this change, we infer, are lessons ego gleans from the mythical figures whose lives he narrates to Hieron. As the ode moves forward, these lessons change the poet’s own composition tactics: from piling up exuberant unattainable wishes and counterfactuals, to yearning for what is distant and impossible, he finally prays to Mother Cybele in the indicative mood, respectful of limits and enjoying what is near at hand. We see ego hard at work, practicing the very value he affirms in the ode’s final line: “for few among humans is attainment easy.” In his final, completed state, ego epitomizes the virtuous and skillful creator of poetry who appreciates and learns from song. Pythian 3 is about undertaking challenges, enduring hardship, and embracing poetic wisdom. Ego practices what he urges Hieron to do, and since Hieron, in time, becomes a stand-in for others who are in dire circumstances, the lessons seep into the larger public.

Pindar begins the ode with a deliberately tentative, unattainable wish—or a counterfactual, depending on whether you read the missing verb in the protasis as the imperfect ἦν or, with Peliccia and Currie, as present tense εἰμι.Footnote ⁴³ Subsequent bona fide counterfactuals in the poem clarify this initial and probably intentional syntactic ambiguity, so that, as the ode unfolds, a live audience hears the counterfactuals (retroactively or cumulatively) as a set. As a set, the counterfactuals are an important structural component of the ode that contribute, as we shall see,.to the meaning of this epinikion.

The extensive mythical text (5–58) recounts the story of Chiron, the philanthropic centaur, his tutoring of Asklepios, son of Apollo, and his pupil’s punishment for misusing his medical skill. The phrase οἷος ἐὼν, “being such a one,” modifying Chiron, provides the transition into the mythical text and the transport to the time when the centaur reared Asklepios and taught him the art of healing.

The myth is presented in two parallel segments, each ending in a cataclysm at the hands of an offended god. In the first, Koronis, a Thessalian princess, enrages Apollo when she sleeps with a stranger (Ischys of Arcadia), though pregnant with the seed of the god. In addition to her sexual transgression Koronis violates a ritual injunction by not waiting to hear the hymeneals or marriage songs at a wedding feast (16–19), an insensitivity to ritual that makes her the antithesis of an appreciator of poetic song. In a maxim (21–23) ego associates her sexual and social misbehavior with a whole class (φῦλον) of humans who do not seek what is at hand but yearn for the distant; their outcome is disastrous. By Apollo’s designs (τέχναις Ἀπόλλωνος) Artemis destroys her, but Apollo, in an act of clemency, rescues his son from the pyre and from the womb of the dying Koronis. His speech on this occasion is quoted in direct discourse, bringing interpreters into proximity with the mythic event.

The rescue of Asklepios from the dire destiny of his mother inaugurates the second segment: Apollo takes Asklepios to the wise centaur for his medical education. There Asklepios practices all manner of healing, but eventually, lured by gold, he resuscitates a dead man, thus enraging Zeus, who thunderbolts them both.

Though each segment emphasizes the negative outcome of a human transgression, in each there is some reprieve. When Koronis dies, her relatives place her on a funeral pile and give her a proper burial, suggesting that she is still part of her community. Apollo rescues his infant son and, for a time, Asklepios practices his trade as a physician. Once he is thunderbolted, no reprieve is mentioned; but one scholar views his violent death as an occasion for cult, a kind of immortality.Footnote ⁴⁴

Pindar depicts the narrator of this doubly calamitous myth, ego, as changing his speech behavior as a result of his own narration. First he pronounces a maxim (59–60) that endorses the value of living in the here and now. The maxim sums up the lesson he extracts from the myth: “We must, with mortal minds, seek from the gods such things as are befitting, / knowing what lies before our feet [τὸ πὰρ ποδός], what destiny is ours” (60). Then ego applies the maxim to himself by admonishing his own soul not to “strive for the life of the immortals but exhaust the practical means at your disposal” (61; μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον /σπεῦδε, τὰν δ’ ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν). Thereupon ego modifies his diction: from using exorbitant counterfactuals, piled one upon another, he will eventually pray in the indicative mood (74)—a more sober practice. But first he returns to his earlier wish, the theme of the opening strophe, this time using a clear counterfactual (63–67):

Ego proceeds to pile more counterfactuals on top of the previous ones (72–76), prolonging the fantasy of his trip to Syracuse.

The entire series of counterfactuals saves ego from the plight of Koronis and Asklepios, that is, from verbal hubris and misuse of a link to the gods (Koronis) or of one’s art (τέχνη) (Asklepios). The use of this sustained syntactic device (61–70) allows ego to express his wish with impunity, as he imagines arriving at the fountain of Arethousa at the palace of his Syracusan host. In this fictive scenario he is Hieron’s far-shining light, though in the “real” world of the poem, he remains at the very doorstep of his Theban home, where he listens to the maidens who often sing to the Mother, along with Pan, that is, to Kybele, a holy goddess (79).Footnote ⁴⁵

In Epode Δ, when ego proclaims, “But as it is, my wish is first to offer prayer/ to the great Mother” (74: ἀλλ’ ἐπεύξασθαι μὲν ἐγὼν ἐθέλω), he finally embraces, for the first time in the entire ode, the indicative mood. Pindar’s ego is a frequent audience and host, his house a site of rituals and he himself a connoisseur of ritual music. When he tells Hieron, “Yours is a happy lot: upon a king, / leader of hosts, great Destiny casts smiles / as on no other man” (84–86), ego aligns the Syracusan king, in his lifetime, with Theban Kadmos and Aiakid PeleusFootnote ⁴⁶—models for enduring adversity whose traditions illustrate the universal principle of life’s vicissitudes (86–99). All three connoisseurs of music—Hieron, Kadmos, and Peleus—may be taken as exemplary savvy interpreters of song: while Kadmos and Peleus hear the Muses singing, Hieron hears Pythian 3.Footnote ⁴⁷ In their interpretive expertise (sophia), they differ markedly from Koronis, who does not appreciate even her own wedding hymn. And ego, too, as one who often (θαμἀ) hears music at his doorstep, partakes of the high status of the privileged auditor and interpreter.

By building up the figure of ego as Hieron’s consoler and counselor—indeed, as his far-shining light and thus his benefactor—the stay-at-home poet achieves what he would have wished to accomplish had he crossed the sea to Sicily. His emphasis on his own credentials as a Theban poet with expertise in Theban myth and cult helps legitimize his offering of solace to the Syracusan tyrant and increases the value of his poetic gift. As Kadmos of Thebes and Peleus the descendant of Aiakos are paired in a mythological exemplum, so too are ego and Hieron, though they remain separated by the sea. By representing ego’s activity in Thebes vividly, Pindar entices Hieron to come to Thebes, to hear a chorus of Theban maidens sing to the Mother; in short, to be his guest. As a center of Theban hospitality to song, his house resembles the description of Hieron’s palace in Olympian 1.14–17, where the Syracusan ruler is frequently (θαμά) glorified by the choice of music, “such as we poets perform in play around his welcoming table.” This makes the two characters equals, in a sense, despite Hieron’s status as a patron of the arts and the ruler of Syracuse.

We have traced ego’s “development” from risky speech acts to moderation in his use of syntactic forms (from conditionals to indicatives), his choice of words, and his selection and arrangement of happenings as he interweaves the various textual modalities. The “personality” of ego that eventually emerges is exemplary and worthy of emulation. The epinikion, publicly performed in Syracuse as its metrical choral form suggests, explores the theme of reception of wisdom through poetic song. The consolation offered here to the ailing Hieron supplants the typical victory narrative; yet this atypicality sharply illustrates Pindar’s practice of offering ego’s poetic behavior as a vivid example of how to proceed in any domain of life. When this offer is repeatedly accepted, an epinikion comes ever closer to acquiring lasting kleos.

Conclusion: Recontextualization in Performance

As we have seen in the two case studies discussed above, Pindar is vitally concerned with the relationship between the narrative ego and the local audience as an essential aspect of the poetic process itself. In both Olympian 3 and Pythian 3 Pindar presents ego responding to the mythical lessons he imparts and, with a few verbal gestures, directing them also to himself as a creative and adaptive poet. The moralizing language that he deploys in his maxims—about vicissitudes, turning the best outward, and striving for what is near at hand—causes him to alter his course. He approaches the finish line of his victory odes with renewed verbal mastery (aretê) and also with clarity and poetic wisdom (sophia). Ego obviously stars in those narrative modalities that appear to be unfolding in the here and now. It is their pseudospontaneity that beckons to savvy interpreters, making available to all of us the aretê and sophia that ego enacts before our mind’s eyes. This is what is meant by “imaginative deixis”: traveling with ego, even when he is accompanying mythical characters like Herakles and the Dioscourids, or Koronis and Asklepios, we interpreters take vicarious journeys. In doing so, we appropriate the challenges and triumphs of the heroes, athletes, and, most importantly, ego himself. Our special challenge, however, is to decipher poetic enigmas that Pindar purposefully places in his odes. Like ego and others who succeed, we must supplement our natural talent (phua) with solid labor—filling in gaps, retrieving a coherent storyline, lining up complex and often imperfect parallelisms, and linking various series of “translated” material symbols.

In Pythian 3 by use of the pragmatic analogy between Asklepios’s curing by medicine and healing by his own consoling words, Pindar asserts the general principle that it is only through the genius of “skilled craftsmen of song” that we know the archaic stories upon which we can model our behavior and anticipate our fate. Grounded in these exempla from the mythological texts and the corresponding maxims from the gnomic texts, we, as listeners, can trust in the regularity of this process of textual replication thanks to the efforts of poets. But, as we have noted, this guarantee always involves risk, as clearly outlined in the sudden reversals and partial remediations narrated in the ode’s mythological texts. Pindar closes this ode with his usual twist: if you think that being virtuous is difficult, consider how difficult it is to compose the praise poetry that renders virtue knowable into the future: “It is radiant poetry that makes virtue long-lived, but for few is the making easy” (115).

In addition to this stated difficulty of the poetic task, a task Pindar performatively proclaims his outstanding competence to accomplish, the conclusion of this ode indirectly suggests that the projected complete interpretation of the composition, including a sophisticated metapragmatic grasp of the relationship among the multiple textual modalities, is equally difficult, though accomplishable by a select group of savvy interpreters, those “few” for whom “the making”—that is, the virtual metapragmatic interpretant—is “easy.” And when we do succeed, inspired and trained by Pindar, wiser (we hope) and more virtuous, we bring together the occasional and the timeless and join an ever-growing community of savvy interpreters of the victory odes.

The recent turn toward the study of performance in classical scholarship on Homeric epic and choral lyric poetry has naturally focused attention on the historical transition from oral to written registers (Nagy Reference Nagy1990a). At issue in this paper, in contrast, is not so much the actual diachrony of entextualization (Parmentier Reference Parmentier2012, 195) subsequent to the performance event—whether reperformed on the occasion of celebrations within same family of additional athletic victories, in subsequent symposia (Kurke Reference Kurke1991, 5), edited in written form by later redactors, or even inscribed in golden letters at the temple of Athena on Rhodes (Walker Reference Walker2000, 193).Footnote ⁴⁸ Rather, we argue that the expectations generated in the original event itself—crucially, about the linkage between present praise and future renown—break the bonds of the here and now and that the interpretations of first audiences must engage this insight as a pragmatic rule constitutive of their understanding of the genre (Hubbard Reference Hubbard and Mackie2004, 72). Our insistence on the pragmatic rule of recontextualization as fundamental to the metapragmatic interpretant in the context of performance is echoed in Nagy’s (Reference Nagy, Athanassaki and Bowie2011) discussion of the praise poems of Bacchylides, where the poet sets up a metonymic sequence of reenacted ritual acts, including the “overall ritual act of performing the victory ode” (199). (Nagy, in fact, points to a direct comparison with Pindar’s Nemean 5.50–51.) And our argument can be seen as the inverse of that of Pfeijffer (as cited in Morrison Reference Morrison, Agócs, Carey and Rawles2012, 113n), who claims that Pindar’s focus was fully on the “encomiastic aims in the context of the first performance” and that subsequent reperformances that might occur decrease in importance proportional to their distance from the first event (Carey 2007, 199).

Ledbetter’s (Reference Ledbetter2002) points out Pindar’s careful metaattention to the nature of poetic inspiration and creativity—especially in portraying the poet as the correct interpreter of the Muse’s oracle and the poem itself as an “intrinsically meaningful interpretation of [that] inspiration” (66). In this way, each of Pindar’s praise poems is another instance of the Muse’s singing. More interesting for our purposes, however, is Ledbetter’s passing comment that, in inviting the gods themselves to join the audience for the “current performance” (75), “Pindar imposes a standard for human responses to his poem, as it elevates its human auditors.” In our terms, Pindar as interpreter models his audiences as equally savvy interpreters.

Wells (Reference Wells2009, 28) is certainly correct in arguing that, as performances, Pindar’s victory odes are “open-ended,” in the sense that all verbal performances are “emergent” or “risky,” since their final textual shape is never completely fixed in advance. (Think, for example, of relying only on the prepared text of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to understand what happened at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.) Pragmatic outcome is never guaranteed, and there is always the potential for “backfiring” if contextual parameters conspire against the performative success.Footnote ⁴⁹ But, from our perspective of focusing on textual modalities, Pindar does his best to direct, with skill and assurance, the audiences’ final interpretant; and so, in this sense, the victory odes are “closed texts,” to use Umberto Eco’s (Reference Eco1979) notion. But note that citing Eco’s idea of closed texts does not imply that the process of interpretation itself is fixed or comes to a sudden halt; in fact, what is “closed” in Pindar is the specificity of what Peirce calls the “determination” (EP Reference Peirce2.392–93) of the rules of interpretation.

In arguing that Pindar’s odes specify pragmatic rules demanding widespread reperformance we are suggesting that scholars who stress the paucity of references to their performance parameters (Herington Reference Herington1985, 30) might see this, rather, as one means for Pindar to facilitate recontextualization with different parameters (solo voice, limited instruments, no dancing). In a detailed discussion of deixis in Pythian 1, Athanassaki (Reference Athanassaki, Grethlein and Rengakos2009, 250) provides another corrective to the “paucity” argument, citing the parallelism drawn between the “eternally recurrent” divine performances by the gods on Olympus and the diachrony of human reperformance at public festivals.

Comparative ethnographic experience and common sense combine to suggest that it would be practically impossible for the original audience, hearing a recently composed praise song for the first time, to come to a complete grasp of the relationship among the component textual modalities, that is, to entextualize the metapragmatic interpretant in the context of the original performance. Thomas (Reference Thomas, Agócs, Carey and Rawles2012), citing recent scholarship on Pindar and comparative evidence of praise poetry in Africa, summarizes possible ways that “difficulty” (e.g., sudden transitions and break-offs, obscure allusions, and compressed style) might increase the audience’s understanding: density makes the poem more memorable; elaboration elevates the sense of occasion; difficulty is read as profundity; risk only increases excitement; political relevance encourages extreme concentration; spontaneity keeps the audience on “tenterhooks”; and ambiguity encourages postperformance discussion.

But it is not unreasonable for audiences to understand that their role as interpreters is crucial for starting the song—and thus the kleos of the laudandus—on its far-flung “journey.” As Thomas (Reference Thomas, Hornblower and Morgan2007, 148) points out, citing in particular Nemean 5.1–15 and Isthmian 2.44–46, the metaphor of movement is used to convey the sense “that the ‘news’— and the ‘song’—will travel far in the present and far into the future.” In fact, overcoming difficulties in interpretation, just like overcoming challenges in athletic competition, is not something to be avoided: it is the whole point of the genre which so skillfully identifies its referent—the immediate glory of the victor’s triumph—with its future interpretant—immortality achieved through poetic creativity.Footnote ⁵⁰

Silk (Reference Silk, Hornblower and Morgan2007, and cf. Reference Silk1998, 65–66) envisions the relationship between the token-level of “momentary events” and the type-level of aristocratic values, poetic conventions, and mythological traditions as forming an “inverted pyramid” in which the bulk of the type-level material “enacted” in the odes balance precariously on the point of “praise” performance: “Poetic life, life as conveyed, or created, by this poetry is—if not sweet—at least possibly glorious, or gloriously possible, but only so long as the oh-so-precarious inverted pyramid stays in its place. Cough skeptically at any of Pindar’s connectings and enactings, and the whole construction seems to wobble” (196). In order for this balance to remain unchallenged, interpreters, both contemporary hearers and modern readers, need to be “attuned to a configuration—of the physical, cultural, symbolic, and poetic—within which the mere thought of a cough has no place.” But Silk’s image needs to be corrected in two respects. First, we need to clarify the connection between indexical relations (that is, signs to contiguous objects) and type-token relations (that is, instantiation of generals in instances): cultures consist of indexical types (and, of course, iconic types), what Peirce calls “indexical legisigns,” that is, regularities of pragmatic functioning.Footnote ⁵¹ And, as we have argued, kleos is the key pragmatic rule in Pindar’s odes. Second, in postulating an image of a static inverted pyramid, Silk downplays the temporal dimension, namely, the constant theme in the odes that momentary “praise” really isn’t praise at all: the glory of victory needs to spread widely in space and time by means of the interpreted ode as its travelling vessel. The poetic celebration is, thus, of a different semiological order from the athletic victory: the former is an enactable type while the latter is only a referred-to event. That is, while the victory of the laudandus can be placed in a sequence of similar events (including mythological exempla and the performance celebration itself), this semiotic construal is ratified only if the interpreters construct interpretants of the ode’s “configuration” in such a way that realizes that it is the overarching pragmatic rule of recontextualization that propels the poetic ship on its journey (Currie Reference Currie and Mackie2004, 50).Footnote ⁵² That the poet has this inspired and creative ability to render an event token into an event type is at once an authorization and a model for savvy interpreters to continue the generativity that Peirce so wisely judged to be the essence of all fully symbolic relations.