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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520300002 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2019 |
| Series: | World Literature in Translation |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 376 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
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INTRODUCTION
1. Generally reckoned the greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece, Pindar was born in a village near Thebes, the chief city of Boeotia, in 518 B.C. According to ancient accounts of his life, he studied music and choral poetry in Athens as a youth; the training was evidently effective, since his earliest datable poem, Pythian 10, was composed in 498, when he was only twenty. In the collected edition produced by the Hellenistic scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 257–180 B.C.) his large and varied poetic output filled seventeen volumes (i.e., papyrus rolls), their contents organized according to genre; among the different types of composition were hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, maiden-songs (partheneia), dirges, and odes for victorious athletes (epinikia or epinicians). Pindar received poetic commissions from individuals, families, and whole communities throughout the Greek world, including the rulers of some of its wealthiest and most powerful cities; the distribution of dedicatees among his epinicians suggests that he found a particularly eager market for his services in Sicily and on the island of Aegina, which together account for more than half the corpus. His latest datable epinician, Pythian 8, was composed in 446. If one ancient source is correct in asserting that he lived to his eightieth year, he died in 438.
2. Out of Pindar's extensive oeuvre only the four books of victory odes have come down to us through a continuous manuscript tradition, accompanied by numerous marginal notes ("scholia") extracted from earlier commentaries, most notably those written by Aristarchus (ca. 217–145 B.C.) and Didymus (ca. 80–10 B.C.). Each of the books contains odes written for victories gained at one of the four major game-sites of ancient Greece (Olympia, Pytho, Nemea, and the Isthmus of Corinth), while within each book odes are arranged according to the types of contest that they celebrate (first equestrian events, then combat sports, then footraces). In the original edition of Pindar's works the Isthmian odes were placed ahead of the Nemeans to reflect the relative prestige of the two festivals (see below, §4), and for that reason it was to the Nemeans as the final volume that three otherwise unclassifiable poems (N. 9, N. 10, N. 11) were attached as a kind of appendix; at a later point the order was reversed and the volume of Isthmians lost its final pages. As extant, the corpus comprises forty-five complete odes: fourteen Olympians, twelve Pythians, eleven Nemeans (three of them Nemean in name only), and eight Isthmians (plus the first eight lines of a ninth). Individual odes are conventionally identified by book and numerical position, e.g., Olympian 2 (O. 2), Pythian 4 (P. 4), Nemean 6 (N. 6), Isthmian 8 (I. 8).
GREEK ATHLETICS
3. The fact that out of all Pindar's many works it was the victory odes that survived essentially intact — like, indeed, the fact that there was such a genre as the victory ode in the first place — reflects the central role played by athletics in the life of the ancient Greeks. That centrality is itself reflective of a culture-wide competitiveness that finds archetypical expression in the injunction issued by Peleus to his son Achilles when he went off to fight at Troy (Iliad 11.783): "Always to be the best and preeminent over others." From the realm of myth, with its Judgment of Paris (which of three goddesses deserved a golden apple inscribed "to the fairest"?) and its Contest of Arms (should Ajax or Odysseus be the one to inherit Achilles' armor and, with it, his status as "best of the Achaeans"?), to the dramatic festivals of Athens, where every year both tragic and comic poets vied for first, second, and third place, to the military custom of awarding "prizes of valor" (aristeia) to individual warriors or entire contingents in the aftermath of victory, to female beauty-contests on the island of Lesbos and even a boys' kissing-contest at Megara — everywhere the drive to excel and to outdo others is apparent. Among its various institutional manifestations none were as ubiquitous and long-enduring as the games, the athloi or agones that have given us the words "athlete" and "athletics" and provided a somewhat abstruse synonym for "competitive" in "agonistic." The representation of athletics in Greek literature is as old as Greek literature itself, since Book 23 of the Iliad contains a lengthy and detailed account of the funeral games put on by Achilles for his beloved friend Patroclus, while Book 8 of the Odyssey offers a briefer description of contests staged by the Phaeacians for the entertainment of Odysseus. In historical times, however, the usual context for competition was provided by regularly recurring religious festivals in dozens of different cities and locales, each one held in honor of some patron deity or hero and accompanied by a full array of animal sacrifices and other ritual activities.
4. Among these athletic festivals — called panegyreis as well as agones, both terms in origin meaning "gathering" or "assembly" — four enjoyed special status as being Panhellenic ("all Greek") in character, drawing competitors and spectators from throughout the Greek-speaking world. By far the oldest and most celebrated of the four were the games at Olympia, a sanctuary of Olympian Zeus in the western Peloponnesus, which were founded in 776 B.C. and held thereafter at four-year intervals (known as Olympiads) for well over a millennium. Next in order of prestige were the Pythian games at Delphi in central Greece, a site known also as Pytho; likewise quadrennial but dedicated to the god Apollo, they were established in 582 and took place in the third year of each Olympiad. Very shortly thereafter (ca. 581 and ca. 573) biennial games were instituted at the Isthmus of Corinth and at Nemea in the northeastern Peloponnesus, dedicated respectively to Poseidon and to Zeus. Since these festivals were held in the second and fourth year of each Olympiad (the Isthmian in the spring, the Nemean in the summer), athletes were able to compete in at least one Panhellenic contest every year. The four festivals taken together constituted a well-defined circuit or cycle (periodos) of competition, with Nemea as the lowest rung on the ladder, the Isthmus next, then Pytho, and Olympia at the very top. Ambitious athletes would aspire to win victories at all four venues and thereby earn the coveted status of "circuit-victor" (periodonikes). Lying outside of the Panhellenic circuit, but still playing an important role in the careers of athletes, were numerous local festivals hosted by communities large and small throughout the Greek-speaking world, including venues in Attica and its environs (Eleusis, Marathon, Megara), Boeotia (Thebes, Orchomenus), the Peloponnesus (Argos, Epidaurus, Sicyon, Pellene, Arcadia), the Aegean islands (Aegina, Euboea), North Africa (Cyrene), and Sicily. Several of these local contests, most notably the Athenian Panathenaea and the festival of Hera (Heraea) in Argos, enjoyed a position of prestige not far below that of the Isthmian and Nemean games; others, however, were very minor indeed and unlikely to attract many non-regional competitors.
5. At athletic festivals generally, of whatever rank or stature, the chief categories of competition were equestrian events, footraces of different kinds, and combat sports. Particularly popular with spectators were the equestrian events, which comprised races for horse and rider (keles), the four-horse chariot (tethrippon), and the mule-cart (apene), although this last formed part of the Olympic program only during the first half of the fifth century B.C. The considerable expense involved in breeding, maintaining, and transporting horses effectively limited participation in the equestrian events to the well-to-do, and credit for victory went to the owner of the horse or chariot team in question rather than to its rider or driver. Since the layout of the hippodrome required chariots to negotiate 180-degree turns at either end throughout a twelve-lap race, there was a constant risk of serious accidents. The track events were four in number: the stade-race or stadion (ca. 200 meters), the double stade-race or diaulos (ca. 400 meters), the long race or dolichos (ca. 4,800 meters), and the race-in-armor or hoplites dromos, for which contestants wore and carried the equipment (including breastplate, greaves, and shield) of a heavy-armed foot soldier or hoplite. The combat sports were wrestling (in which three throws were required for victory), boxing (for which contestants wore leather straps around their knuckles instead of gloves), and the pancratium, an "all-in" contest that combined elements of wrestling and boxing (the only prohibited tactics were biting and eye-gouging). Straddling several categories, finally, was the pentathlon, composed of stade-race, long jump, discus, javelin-toss, and wrestling. In certain events (stade-race, pentathlon, the combat sports) separate competitions were held for boys, while at the Isthmus, Nemea, and various local games there was also an intermediate division for "beardless" youths or ageneioi, most likely defined as between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.
6. The types of prizes awarded to victorious athletes varied according to venue. At the funeral games of Patroclus in Iliad 23, Achilles sets out as many prizes as there are contestants in any one event, with a correlation between their material value and the range of outcomes; in a three-man footrace, for example, he offers a large silver mixing bowl as first prize, an ox as second, and half a talent of gold as third. At the regular athletic festivals of historical times, however, only first place was recognized, and hence a single prize was awarded in each event. The prizes offered at the four major festivals were simple wreaths or crowns (stephanoi) plaited from a particular foliage: wild olive at Olympia, laurel at Pytho, and wild celery both at the Isthmus and at Nemea (some ancient sources identify the Isthmian wreath as being of pine, but in Pindar's epinicians only celery is mentioned). Though purely symbolic in value, such wreaths were greatly coveted and conferred on the Panhellenic festivals the alternative designation of "crown games"; moreover, the home-cities of victorious athletes made a practice of supplementing symbolism with cash awards and various types of subsidy, including free meals at public expense for the rest of their lives. The prizes awarded at local contests, by contrast, were likely to be durable objects of material value, such as decorated jars (amphorae) of olive oil at the Panathenaea, bronze shields at the Argive Heraea, silver drinking-cups at the games of Apollo in Sicyon, and thick woolen cloaks at Pellene.
THE EPINICIAN AS PERFORMANCE
7. In the end, however, the most important reward of athletic success was not the symbolic or material prize itself but the mere fact that the victor was publicly known to have won, that his "preeminence over others" had received recognition in the world at large. The ultimate objects of aspiration, in other words, were reputational in nature, bearing such names as "honor" (time), "glory" (doxa), "renown" (kudos), and "fame" (kleos). The first step in securing such public recognition was taken at the time of the festival itself, when a herald would proclaim that so-and-so, son of so-and-so, from such-and-such a city, was the victor in such-and-such an event; but of course this kind of proclamation (kerygma) was a fleeting event, confined in its efficacy to a single place and time. Inscribed on a statue-base or stele and set up for view at the game-site or in some other public location, the essential facts of an athlete's achievement — supplemented, as was often the case, by the record of other achievements at other venues — could (with luck) be preserved for future generations, but the information was still spatially restricted; only people who happened to visit the site in question could be expected to observe and absorb, as the Greek travel-writer Pausanias (ca. A.D. 150) so assiduously did, the names and deeds of the long-departed. To propagate agonistic kleos with maximum effectiveness, therefore, required combining the functions of the herald's cry and the lapidary (or bronze) inscription while simultaneously transcending their temporal and/or spatial limitations — and it was precisely with such an end in view that an athlete (or his family) would hire a professional poet to commemorate his success in a victory ode. Considered as a performance, executed by a trained chorus within a context of communal celebration, an epinician was — among other things — a highly expanded and elaborated recreation of the original heraldic proclamation at the game-site, but one that allowed for (literal or imaginative) re-performance at other times and in other circumstances. Considered as a text, on the other hand, it was endowed with the permanence, the fixity, and the documentary utility of a "reckoning carved on stone" (O. 7.86), effectively preserving information for posterity while adding the capacity for active circulation through space that epigraphic records so signally lack.
8. That epinicians were indeed composed to be performed — that is, sung and danced — to musical accompaniment by a male chorus is a point assumed in the ancient scholia, generally (though not universally) agreed upon by modern scholars, and borne out by various passages in the poems themselves. The instruments used (and frequently mentioned in the odes) were the lyre (lyra, phorminx) and/or the aulos, the latter (translated as "pipe" in this volume) being a wind instrument with a reed-and-metal mouthpiece that made it akin to the modern clarinet or oboe. Both types of instrument were capable of being played in distinctively different styles or "modes" of tuning, among them the Aeolian (e.g., O. 1.102, P. 2.69) and the Lydian (e.g., O. 14.17, N. 4.45). In the absence of any musical or choreographic notation, however, the only hints at the odes' performative aspects available to us are those offered by the metrical patterns of the verse itself. The two chief categories of meter employed in Pindar's epinicians — based, like all Greek meters, on the alternation of long () and short () syllables in various combinations — are the dactylo-epitritic and the aeolic. The former, found in just over half the odes, strings together double-short (e.g. ) and single-short (e.g.×) segments in different lengths and sequences ("x" indicates a syllable that may be either long or short); its partial overlap with the dactylic hexameter of Homeric epic can be felt to endow this rhythm with a certain amplitude and stateliness. More multifarious and less easily described than dactylo-epitritic as a metrical category, aeolic verse draws extensively on metrical segments built around a "choriambic nucleus" () and was much used by composers of monody ("solo song") like Alcaeus and Sappho, who wrote in the Aeolic dialect.
9. Regardless of metrical type, the great majority of Pindar's odes are composed of three-part units called triads, each triad comprising two metrically identical stanzas (the strophe and antistrophe) followed by another of a different shape (the epode). Some sources from late antiquity associate the literal meaning of these terms ("turn," "counter-turn," "after-song") with hypothetical movements by the chorus (dancing in one direction during the strophe, reversing that direction during the antistrophe, standing still during the epode), but there is no evidence to confirm that hypothesis. Although most triadic odes range in length between three and five triads, a few (O. 4, O. 11, O. 12, P. 7, I. 3) consist of a single triad only, while the entirely anomalous Pythian 4 runs to a remarkable thirteen. Seven odes (O. 14, P. 6, P. 12, N. 2, N. 4, N. 9, I. 8) are monostrophic rather than triadic in form, comprising a series of strophes of metrically identical shape that range in number from two (O. 14) to twelve (N. 4). It has been suggested that monostrophic odes were intended to be sung while the chorus was in procession from one place to another, but once again there can be no certainty on the point. It is important to note that in Pindar's practice stanzas and triads as metrical entities bear no consistent relationship either with content relationship either with content or with syntax, which means that not only general topics but even individual clauses are frequently carried over from one unit to another. This fluidity can at times achieve striking effects, as when a phrase or word is placed at the end of a sentence and the beginning of a strophe simultaneously for rhetorical emphasis (e.g., "most among men" at O. 8.23, "Time itself" at O. 10.55, "late though it be" at N. 3.80) or to underscore its emotional impact (e.g., "his own destruction" at P. 2.41, referring to Ixion's self-wrought doom; "pitiless woman" at P. 11.22, characterizing Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon and Cassandra).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Odes"
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