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
2. Epinikion as Event For Dell Hymes the notion of a speech community, one of the fundamental notions of the Ethnography of Speaking, addresses how members of a community conceive of language and emphasizes the ethnographic description of language use (1974:47–51). The previous chapter presented evidence to show that, from the point of view of the community of artists and audiences who participated in epinician performance, epinician… Read more
3. Ways of Epinician Speaking I The first chapter of Pindar’s Verbal Art urged a fundamental analytical reorientation to the epinician text, from words written to words spoken. Here a further analytical shift is motivated, that from text to context—more specifically, from text to speech event—as the object of analysis. Chapter Two demonstrated that the epinician text records features that key the speech event of epinician performance—or… Read more
4. Ways of Epinician Speaking II The forms of prayer in Pindar’s epinikia are diverse, but they have converging stylistic features that indicate an overall pattern, a speech genre. The multiformity of precatory speech acts in Pindar’s epinikia complicates the preliminary question involved in the description of every simple epinician speech genre—how to define the domain of analysis. If the objective is to describe the patterning of… Read more
Conclusions Cⓢ1. Five centuries of Homeric transmission C§1. I propose to outline here the overall chronology of Homeric transmission as I have reconstructed it in this book. The basis for my overall reconstruction is the Homeric Koine, which I have equated with the Panathenaic Homer in the era of the Athenian democracy. This Koine was relatively unaugmented. To be contrasted is the Homerus Auctus, which I… Read more
