The text of this poem, already corrupt in the Palatine, has had a turbulent history over the last two centuries. Here is Page's version, the translation in Gow–Page, and my own somewhat expanded apparatus: I who in time past was good for five or nine times, now, Aphrodite, hardly manage once from early night to sunrise. The thing itself, – already often only at half-strength, – is gradually dying. That's the last straw. Old age, old age, what will you do (...) later when you come to me, if even now I am as languid as this. (shrink)

Discussion of the closing lines of Pindar¿s seventh Nemean has concentrated almost exclusively on the lines¿ relevance to the larger question that hangs over the poem: does the ode serve as an apologia for the poet¿s uncomplimentary treatment of Neoptolemus in an earlier Paean, and is Pindar here most plainly gainsaying the vilification in which he supposedly previously engaged. The reading that I offer suggests that a very different concern frames the conclusion to the work. Rather than seeking to exculpate (...) himself, the poet announces instead that in the song that the audience has just heard, the composer has adhered to two prime virtues that the encomiastic genre should embrace: variatio and an ability to counter the language of blame. By reorienting the debate in this way, I aim to elucidate the striking metaphors and other rhetorical devices that fill the final lines, and most particularly to make sense of the canine imagery that seems so recurrent a motif. As my reading seeks to show, the dog is chosen as master trope both for his relation to the practice of invective and for his relevance to that stale act of repetition that the poet here rejects. By giving his audience a sample of the mode of speech that the calumnist practises, and that the praise poet may appropriate when combating the opposite genre, Pindar makes the merits of his own poetry shine the brighter, and invites the cognoscenti to appreciate his sophia. More broadly, the encomiastic singer¿s brief deployment of the weapons of the abuse poet allows us to understand something of the overlapping and symbiotic relations between the different genres in archaic Greek poetry. (shrink)

The importance of music for epinician, as for all other types of choral performance in Archaic and Classical Greece, has long been recognized, but the exiguousness of the evidence for the compositional principles behind such music, and for what these poems actually sounded like in performance, has limited scholarly enquiries. Examination of Pindar's texts themselves for evidence of his musical practices was for a long time dominated by extensive and often inconclusive debate about the relations between metres and modes. More (...) recently scholars have begun to explore Pindar's relations to contemporary developments in musical performance, and in doing so have opened up new questions about how music affected audiences as aesthetically and culturally significant in its own right, and how it interacted with the language of the text. This article will investigate the performance scenarios of two of Pindar's epinicians, arguing that in each case the poems contain indications of specific musical accompaniments, and use these scenarios as a starting point for engaging with wider interpretative questions. The self-referential dimension of these compositions will be of particular importance; I shall argue that Pindar deployed a type of musical intertextuality, in which his compositions draw on pre-existing melodic structures, utilizing their cultural associations for the purposes of his own pieces, a process crucial to the dynamics of performance of the poems concerned. By doing so I shall attempt to reach a better understanding of the roles played by music in epinician performance and of Pindar's place in relation to the musical culture in which he worked. (shrink)

The ego or speaking subject of Pindar's Sixth Paian is anomalous, as has been acknowledged by many scholars. In a genre whose ego is predominantly choral, the speaking subject at the beginning of Paian 6 differentiates himself from the chorus and confidently analogizes his poetic authority to the prophetic power of Delphi by his self-description as αοίδιμον Πιερίδων προfάταν. I would like to correlate Pindar's exceptional ego in this poem with what has recently emerged as the poem's exceptional performance context. (...) Following Ian Rutherford's 1997 discovery of a second marginal title for the third triad , we might postulate performance by two choruses: the first two triads sung by a Delphian chorus stationary at the altar, the last triad sung by an Aiginetan chorus as they process to the altar. The need to reconcile within the poem and the space of performance two choruses, two communities, and two local mythic traditions generates the strikingly prominent speaking subject of Paian 6 as a mediating figure. (shrink)