I. Spatio-temporal Poetics of the Past in Ancient Greece “Memory is the present of the past.” Saint Augustine, Confessions 11.20,26 The transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century has helped history to experience a real renewal, both as a determining influence on our social life and as an academic discipline. Historians can no longer consider it enough merely to denigrate the… Read more
II. The Succession of Ages and Poetic Pragmatics of Justice: Hesiod’s Narrative of the Five Human Species What has not been said or written about the “myth of the races?” Inserting Hesiod’s didactic Works poem into a specific time and space, this narrative in Homeric diction is the best example of a text which periodically inspires and focuses interpretive controversy among philologists sorely in need of a… Read more
III. Creation of Gender and Heroic Identity between Legend and Cult: The Political Creation Of Theseus By Bacchylides Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes,” or “a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” [1] Quoting definitions taken out of their contexts could hardly be said to show intellectual rigor or academic collegiality. But… Read more
IV. Regimes of Historicity and Oracular Logic: How To Re-Found A Colonial City? 1. Cyclical and philosophical temporalities It is a common opinion that Greek concepts of time are deeply marked by the image of the circle, that they refer to a fundamentally cyclical temporality. Historians of “Greek thought,” while applying this traditional idea for themselves, also introduced a whole series of nuances concerning its development. Read more
V. Ritual and Initiatory Itineraries toward the Afterlife: Time, Space, and Pragmatics in the Gold Lamellae Western postmodernism, moving now toward hyper- or meta-modernism, has been characterized both by the desire for immediate profit and by the development of means of communication and multi-media. These two phenomena are brought together by the omnipresence of advertising in all the new technical means of communication, an advertising designed to… Read more
By Way of Conclusion: Returns to the Present Truth loves to prevail,and all-conquering timealways fosters the deed that is well done Bacchylides 13.204-207 (translation by Campbell 1992:201) Inserted into a poem by Bacchylides which celebrates the victory of an athlete of Aegina in the Nemean games, this aphorism on truth (alḗtheia) which always triumphs with time (khrónos) might well serve as the very foundation for the representation of time we might attribute to any good classical Greek. Variations on… Read more
Bibliography Adam, J.-M. 1991. Le récit ed. 3. Paris. Adam, J.-M., Lugrin, G., and Revaz, F. 1998. “Pour en finir avec le couple récit/discours.” Pratiques 100:81-97. Aellen, Ch. 1994. A la recherche de l’ordre cosmique. Forme et fonction des personnifications dans la céramique italiote. Zurich. Affergan, F. 1987. Exotisme et altérité. Essai sur les… Read more
5. Novelistic Features of Epinician Style To approach epinikion as a novelistic form of discourse is an effective basis for stylistic description of the genre and for understanding the art form from the perspective of intersubjective objectivity. To be clear at the outset, I identify Pindar’s art as a form of novelistic discourse and not as a novel, understood as a prose form of verbal art. Read more
Conclusion The line outside the bus starts with Iris. Behind her stands the widow of the pastor in Michigan who died after being hit by a car, could Lance write a letter to be read at the funeral? Behind her stand the parents of a twelve-year-old Pennsylvania boy wondering if Armstrong might have a minute to make a phone call. Behind them stand still others,… Read more
Appendix This Appendix documents the analysis described in Chapters 3 and 4 above and applied to all of Pindar’s epinikia. The primary purpose of this Appendix is to provide supporting evidence for the arguments presented in Chapters 3 and 4, principally that five ways of epinician speaking—gnôma, lyric, angelia, mythological narrative, and eukhesthai—constitute the epinician way of speaking. This Appendix also documents the fact that many of… Read more
