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
Abbreviations BA – The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry = N 1979 EH – “The Epic Hero” = N 2005a GM – Greek Mythology and Poetics = N 1990b HQ – Homeric Questions = N 1996b HR – Homeric Responses = N 2003a HTL – Homer’s Text and Language = N 2004a LP… Read more
Foreword to the First Edition [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version of this book.] This book is a partly revised… Read more
Foreword to the English Edition It is a special pleasure for me, almost ten years after finishing the manuscript of the first edition, to present this book in the English language and in lightly revised form. I have made a special attempt in my references to the scholarly literature both in the body of the text and in the footnotes to take into account the most important… Read more
Translator’s Note This translation is long overdue, both in the sense that it has taken me a long time to complete it and in the sense that it is a book that I feel deserves a wider audience than the original German version may have found. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to have worked so closely with it. All translations of passages in… Read more
Abbreviations A & A – Antike und Abendland AION – Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli AJP – American Journal of Philology ARV – J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, I–III, Oxford 19632 Austin – C. Austin, ed., Nova Fragmenta Euripidea in Papyris Reperta (Kleine Texte für Vorlesungen und Übungen 187), Berlin 1968 … Read more
