Pindar's Library is the first volume to analyse the role played by Pindar's literary, cultic, and scholarly reception in affecting readers' engagement with his poetry, considering the continuities between reading and attending performances, and highlighting elements of readers' experiences which were distinctive to Hellenistic culture.

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.

This is the first large-scale edition with introduction and commentary of Pindar’s First Pythian Ode. Composed for Hieron of Syracuse to mark his Delphic chariot victory of 470 BC and his recent foundation of the city of Aetna, the poem is not only a literary masterpiece, but also of central importance for our understanding of Greek history and culture in the early fifth century BC. As our only contemporary written source for the Sicilian Wars against the Carthaginians and Etruscans, it stands on a level with Simonides’ Plataea Elegy and Aeschylus’ Persians on the Persian Wars. This is a period where epoch-making Greek victories in the east and west were celebrated by the greatest poets in a way that reveals much about the atmosphere in which their works were created and received. The book offers a new edition of the text with a detailed introduction and commentary, which discuss textual problems, language, metre and transmission as well as a variety of literary questions, the historical background and the early performance and reception history of the ode. It will be of interest to scholars and students of archaic and classical Greek poetry and of Greek history of the early fifth century BC.

Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

The Greek poet Pindar (c. 518-428 BC) composed victory odes for winners in the ancient Games, including the Olympics. The Odes contain versions of some of the best known Greek myths and are also a valuable source for Greek religion and ethics. Verity's lucid translations are complemented by insights into competition, myth, and meaning. - ;'we can speak of no greater contest than Olympia' The Greek poet Pindar (c. 518-428 BC) composed victory odes for winners in the ancient Games, including the Olympics. He celebrated the victories of athletes competing in foot races, horse races, boxing, wrestling, all-in fighting and the pentathlon, and his Odes are fascinating not only for their poetic qualities, but for what they tell us about the Games. Pindar praises the victor by comparing him to mythical heroes and the gods, but also reminds the athlete of his human limitations. The Odes contain versions of some of the best known Greek myths, such as Jason and the Argonauts, and Perseus and Medusa, and are a valuable source for Greek religion and ethics. Pindar's startling use of language - striking metaphors, bold syntax, enigmatic expressions - makes reading his poetry a uniquely rewarding experience. Anthony Verity's lucid translations are complemented by an introduction and notes that provide insight into competition, myth, and meaning. -

Ancient religions are definitely complex systems of gods, which resist our understanding. Divine names provide fundamental keys to gain access to the multiples ways gods were conceived, characterized, and organized. Among the names given to the gods many of them refer to spaces: cities, landscapes, sanctuaries, houses, cosmic elements. They reflect mental maps which need to be explored in order to gain new knowledge on both the structure of the pantheons and the human agency in the cultic dimension. By considering the intersection between naming and mapping, this book opens up new perspectives on how tradition and innovation, appropriation and creation play a role in the making of polytheistic and monotheistic religions. Far from being confined to sanctuaries, in fact, gods dwell in human environments in multiple ways. They move into imaginary spaces and explore the cosmos. By proposing a new and interdiciplinary angle of approach, which involves texts, images, spatial and archeaeological data, this book sheds light on ritual practices and representations of gods in the whole Mediterranean, from Italy to Mesopotamia, from Greece to North Africa and Egypt. Names and spaces enable to better define, differentiate, and connect gods.

What is distinctive about Greek lyric poetry? How should we conceptualize it in relation to broader categories such as literature / song / music / rhetoric / history? What critical tools might we use to analyse it? How do we, should we, can we relate to its intensities of expression, its modes of address, its uses of myth and imagery, its attitudes to materiality, its sense of its own time, and its contextualizations? These are questions that this discussion seeks to investigate, exploring and analysing a range of influential methodologies that have shaped the recent history of the field.