1. Defining Homeric Sacrifice 1.1 Sacrifice and the Homeric Text Rituals are actions performed in a repetitive pattern recognizable to members of a community that act as symbolic markers of the values underpinning a given society. Such actions can be both symbolic and functional, as is the case with the ritual of animal sacrifice: symbolic actions, such as scattering barley grains or wearing special clothing, elaborate… Read more
2. The Ritual Process The thematic resonance of sacrifice in the Iliad depends on the combination of individual ritual actions, each appropriate to context, which produce a pattern of significance throughout the poem. [1] To better illuminate this pattern, we can catalog the range of possible ritual details in Homeric sacrifices and thus clarify the restricted focus on certain actions according to… Read more
3. The Gift of Sacrifice The post-kill phase of sacrificial ritual can be divided into two categories: gifts for the gods and food for men. [1] Gifts for the gods are proportionately meager in comparison to the feasts enjoyed by the mortal participants. The inequality of these offerings underlies much of ancient Greek discourse about sacrifice, as discussed in Chapter One. Hesiod’s… Read more
Chapter 2. Kômos and Comedy: The Phallic Song between Ritual and Theater The Choral Culture between Literature and Ritual: Origin or Structural Commonalities? When one talks today in a scholarly context about ritual and theater, a culturally preformed association usually asserts itself. Under the influence of Aristotle’s theory of entelekheia, which is also expressed in his Poetics, under the influence of the Enlightenment, and especially as… Read more
Summary and Outlook To talk about ritual requires a great deal of understanding, reflection, and nuanced breadth in order to come even close to doing justice to the complexity of the phenomena involved. Despite the danger of falling prey to simplification after studying the details, I shall nevertheless attempt to summarize my conclusions in brief. The Aristophanic comic chorus should in large part be understood in… Read more
Bibliography Editions of Aristophanes Collected Editions Biset, O. 1607. Aristophanis comoediae undecim . Paris. Küster (= Kusterus), L. 1710. Aristophanis comoediae undecim. Amsterdam. Brunck, R. F. P. 1783. Aristophanis comoediae I–III. Strassburg. Bothe, F. H. 1845. Aristophanis comoediae I–IV. Leipzig. Bekker, I. 1829. Aristophanis comoediae I–V. Read more
Acknowledgments I first arrived at Pindar via Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it was undoubtedly due to my anxiety over lyric influence that I one day read Olympian 1 in Greek when I should have been doing coursework at the University of Missouri, where the Department of Classical Studies had taken the risk of admitting me to its graduate program on the strength of my only-just-self-taught know-ledge of… Read more
Introduction. Philology as Perspective on the Interaction of Language and Social Life [1] Proverbially difficult [2] and commissioned by the elite, Pindar’s victory songs have the reputation of being “high art.” Epinician song, however, served the interests of the elite rulers and families whom it commemorated, not solely by becoming symbols of exclusive power and prestige, but… Read more
1. Text and Sign Following the Ethnography of Speaking, whose descriptive focus is the socially conventional ground rules for a community’s speech practices, this first chapter of Pindar’s Verbal Art explores a question fundamental to the study of epinician style: in what context of situation did people use epinician language? [1] In other words, the point of departure for an ethnographic analysis… Read more
