6. Epic, Praise, and the Possession of Poetry §1. It has been argued that the athlete follows the ritual paradigm of the hero not only through an ordeal at the Games but also through a reintegration, by way of epinician lyric poetry, with the community at home. In what follows, I extend the argument: just as the Games, as ritual, momentarily collapse the distinction between hero and… Read more
5. The Ordeal of the Athlete and the Burden of the Poet §1. Having contemplated the ritual ideology of athletic events in one particular festival from among the four seasonally recurring Panhellenic Games that produced the victors celebrated by the lyric poetry of Pindar, we may proceed to consider how this poetry formally relates itself to such ritual ideology. §2. A prominent word used in the… Read more
4. Pindar’s Olympian 1 and the Aetiology of the Olympic Games §1. Let us begin a closer scrutiny of Pindar’s traditions by examining an occasion that typifies the social context of his authorship. This occasion is memorialized in Pindar’s Olympian 1, a composition commissioned by the tyrant Hieron of Syracuse to celebrate a Panhellenic victory in a horse race event of the Olympics of 476 B.C. Read more
3. The Panhellenization of Song §1. The concept of Panhellenism helps explain not only how the multiple traditions of Archaic Greek oral poetry became a synthetic tradition but also how this tradition, as visualized in the hypothetical schema that has been offered, tended to counteract the emergence of historically verifiable authorship. Further, the concept of Panhellenism also helps explain why the oldest body of Greek literature to… Read more
2. The Poetics of Panhellenism and the Enigma of Authorship in Early Greece §1. I have been attempting both to distinguish poetry from song and to broaden the current concept of oral poetry in such a way as to include song. Since the conventional semantic range of our word poetry tends to exclude song, however, I prefer not to use the actual term oral poetry in this… Read more
1. Oral Poetry and Ancient Greek Poetry: Broadening and Narrowing the Terms §1. The theory of oral poetry as set forth by Milman Parry and Albert Lord resists application to Archaic Greek poetry only if oral poetry is defined too narrowly by the opponents of the theory—and if the surviving poetry of Archaic Greece is treated too broadly as a general example of oral poetry. In what… Read more
Introduction: A Word on Assumptions, Methods, and Aims §1. This effort is a continuation of two earlier books. One of these, The Best of the Achaeans, [1] centered on the role of oral tradition in early Greek achievements of poetic artistry and precision of expression, with Homer in the forefront. The task was difficult, in that I was challenging two influential stances… Read more
Abbreviations The following abbreviations identify works frequently cited in the notes: CEG See Hansen 1983 DELG See Chantraine 1968+ DK See Diels and Kranz 1951-1952 EG See Page 1975 FGH See Jacoby 1923+ GP, GP II… Read more
Acknowledgments This book stems from the Mary Flexner Lectures in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College, which I delivered in the autumn of 1982. I am grateful to Bryn Mawr College for the invitation and for the allocation of a generous subsidy that has helped make this book more affordable. I offer my thanks to Mary Patterson McPherson, President of Bryn Mawr, to Judith Shapiro, the… Read more
Published in 1990 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Copyright, Johns Hopkins University Press. Also available online via Johns Hopkins University Press here. Read more
