AN inquiry into the use of paradeigma in theIliadmust begin with Niobe. At 24. 602 Achilles introduces Niobe in order to encourage Priam to have some food. The dead body of the best of Priam's sons has now been placed on the wagon ready for its journey back to Troy. Achilles says, ‘Now let us eat. For even Niobe ate food, and she had losttwelvechildren. Apollo and Artemis killed them all; they lay nine days in their blood and there was (...) no one to bury them, because Zeus had turned the people into stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. But she managed to eat some food, when she was tired of weeping. And now among the mountains, although turned into stone, she still broods over her sorrows. But come, let us also eat. You can weep for your son again later’. (shrink)

AN inquiry into the use of paradeigma in the Iliad must begin with Niobe. At 24. 602 Achilles introduces Niobe in order to encourage Priam to have some food. The dead body of the best of Priam's sons has now been placed on the wagon ready for its journey back to Troy. Achilles says , ‘Now let us eat. For even Niobe ate food, and she had lost twelve children. Apollo and Artemis killed them all; they lay nine days in (...) their blood and there was no one to bury them, because Zeus had turned the people into stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. But she managed to eat some food, when she was tired of weeping. And now among the mountains, although turned into stone, she still broods over her sorrows. But come, let us also eat. You can weep for your son again later’. (shrink)

This paper will be concerned with Pindar's often-discussed innovations in the Pelops-Tantalos myth of the first Olympian, where Pindar explicitly rejects the traditional story of Tantalos' cooking his son Pelops and serving him up to the gods, one of whom inadvertently ate from the cannibalistic dish. Does Pindar really alter traditional features of a story from religious considerations only, as the communis opinio takes him to do? D. C. Young has recently drawn attention to the astonishing formal symmetry of the (...) ode. As to the contents, however, the old charges against Pindar's poetry, inconsistency and irrelevance, still remain. (shrink)

This paper will be concerned with Pindar's often-discussed innovations in the Pelops-Tantalos myth of the first Olympian, where Pindar explicitly rejects the traditional story of Tantalos' cooking his son Pelops and serving him up to the gods, one of whom inadvertently ate from the cannibalistic dish. Does Pindar really alter traditional features of a story from religious considerations only, as the communis opinio takes him to do? D. C. Young has recently drawn attention to the astonishing formal symmetry of the (...) ode. As to the contents, however, the old charges against Pindar's poetry, inconsistency and irrelevance, still remain. (shrink)