The Center for Hellenic Studies

Chapters

Book Chapter

Chapter 2. Kômos and Comedy: The Phallic Song between Ritual and Theater

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

Book Chapter

Chapter 3. Summary and Outlook

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

Book Chapter

Bibliography

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

Book Chapter

Acknowledgments

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

Book Chapter

1. Text and Sign

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

Book Chapter

2. Epinikion as Event

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

Book Chapter

3. Ways of Epinician Speaking I

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

Book Chapter

4. Ways of Epinician Speaking II

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