Wells argues that the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience and served exclusive elite interests through the inclusive appeal of entertainment, popular instruction, and laughter. Wells offers a new take on old Pindaric questions: genre, unity of the victory song, tradition, and epinician performance.

Combining historical and philological method with contemporary literary analysis, this study of Pindar's longest and most elaborate victory ode, the Fourth Pythian, traces the underlying mythical patterns, implicit poetics, and processes of mythopoesis that animate his poetry. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Pindar's Eyes is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary exploration of the interactions between Greek lyric poetry and visual and material culture in the early fifth century BCE. Its aim is to open up analysis of lyric to the wider theme of aesthetic experience in early classical Greece, with particular focus on the poetic mechanisms through which Pindar's victory odes use visual and material culture to engage their audiences. Complete readings of Nemean 5, Nemean 8, and Pythian 1 reveal the poet's deep interest in the relations between lyric poetry and commemorative and religious sculpture, as well as other significant visual phenomena, while literary studies of his evocation of cultural attitudes through elaborate use of the lyric first person are combined with art-historical treatments of ecphrasis, of image and text, and of art's framing of ritual experience in ancient Greece. This specific aesthetic approach is expanded through fresh treatments of Simonides' and Bacchylides' own engagements with material culture, as well as an account of Pindaric themes in the Aeginetan logoi of Herodotus' Histories. These come together to offer not just a novel perspective on the relationship between art and text in Pindaric poetry, but to give rise to new claims about the nature of classical Greek visuality and ritual subjectivity, and to foster a richer understanding of the ways in which classical poetry and art shaped the lives and experiences of their consumers.

In a major revisionary approach to ancient Greek culture, Sarah Morris invokes as a paradigm the myths surrounding Daidalos to describe the profound influence of the Near East on Greece's artistic and literary origins.

‘Where am I?’. Our physical orientation in place is one of the defining characteristics of our embodied existence. However, while there is no human life, culture, or action without a specific location functioning as its setting, people go much further than this bare fact in attributing meaning and value to their physical environment. 'Landscape’ denotes this symbolic conception and use of terrain. It is a creation of human culture. In Valuing Landscape we explore different ways in which physical environments impacted on the cultural imagination of Greco-Roman Antiquity. In seventeen chapters with different disciplinary perspectives, we demonstrate the values attached to mountains, the underworld, sacred landscapes, and battlefields, and the evaluations of locale connected with migration, exile, and travel.

Pindar's victory odes have suffered from a curious lack of interest on the part of poststructuralism. Even a first, relatively superficial reading of the surviving corpus, however, reveals an intense interest in and exploitation of rhetorical figures and tropes, and an element of autoreferential self-questioning that throughout the history of Pindaric scholarship has attracted much comment. In view of the radical discontinuity within language postulated by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man between what is meant and the mode of meaning, we can on this basis alone ask what effects the rich figurality of the epinicians might have on what they intend to say. Are expression and intention, in these poems, always simply co-extensive? Or do the odes, read in the context of a series of concerns addressed in recent decades by deconstructive literary theory, reveal instead a level of reflection on the nature of literary language itself to which the hermeneutical assumption of such co-extension does not entirely do justice?