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
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
