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… Read more
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… 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. … 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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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… Read more
