Text and translation of all Pindar's paeans, sacred hymns to Apollo, with a supplement containing fragments from poems of uncertain genre. The lengthy introduction provides a re-evaluation of the poems and examines their place in the song-dance culture of Classical and Hellenistic Greece.

The 6th/5th century BCE Greek melic (or songwriting) poet Pindar was one of the most celebrated lyricists of antiquity. His famous victory odes offer a paean to the heroic athlete, and collectively are an attempt to encapsulate, through choral songs of exaltation, the glory of the sportsman's moment of victory - whether in athletics or horse-racing - at a variety of Panhellenic festivals and Olympian games. Yet Pindar, though still respected, is now considered a difficult poet, and is sometimes dismissed as a reactionary, celebrating an aristocratic world that was passing and that deserved to pass. In this first work on the subject for many years, Richard Stoneman shows that Pindar's works, while at first seeming obscure and fragmentary, reward further study. An unmatched craftsman with words, and witness to a profoundly religious sensibility, he is a poet who takes modern readers to the heart of Greek ideas about the gods, fleeting human achievement and fallibility. The author examines questions of performance and genre; patronage; imagery; and reception, beginning with Horace.

Pindar and the Cult of Heroes combines a study of Greek culture and religion (hero cult) with a literary-critical study of Pindar's epinician poetry. It looks at hero cult generally, but focuses especially on heroization in the 5th century BC. There are individual chapters on the heroization of war dead, of athletes, and on the religious treatment of the living in the 5th century. Hero cult, Bruno Currie argues, could be anticipated, in different ways, in a person's lifetime. Epinician poetry too should be interpreted in the light of this cultural context; fundamentally, this genre explores the patron's religious status. The book features extensive studies of Pindar's Pythians 2, 3, 5, Isthmian 7, and Nemean 7.

Recent scholarship on early Greek lyric has been primarily concerned with the immediate contexts of its first performance. This volume instead turns its attention to the rhetoric and realities of poetic permanence. Taking Pindar and archaic Greek literary culture as its focus, it offers a new reading of Pindar's victory odes which explores not only how they were received by those who first experienced them, but also what they can mean to later audiences. Part One of the discussion investigates Pindar's relationship to both of these audiences, demonstrating how his epinicia address the listeners present at their premiere performance and also a broader secondary audience across space and time. It argues that a full appreciation of these texts involves taking both perspectives into account. Part Two describes how Pindar engages with a wide variety of other poetry, particularly earlier lyric, in order to situate his work both within an immanent poetic history and a contemporary poetic culture. It shows how Pindar's vision of the world shaped the meaning of his work and illuminates the context within which he anticipated its permanence. The book offers new insights into the texts themselves and invites us to rethink early Greek poetic culture through a combination of historical and literary perspectives.

The claim that Revelation's hymns function as did Classical tragic choral lyrics insofar as they comment upon or interpret the surrounding narrative has become axiomatic in studies of Revelation. Justin Jeffcoat Schedtler marks an advance in this line of inquiry by offering an exegetical analysis of Revelation's hymns alongside a presentation of the forms and functions of ancient tragic choruses and choral lyrics. Evaluating the hymns in light of the varieties and complexities of ancient tragic choruses, he demonstrate that they are not best evaluated in terms of choral lyrics generally, but in terms of dramatic hymns in particular, insofar as they constitute mythological-theological reflections on the surrounding narrative, and function to situate the surrounding dramatic activity in a particular mythological-theological contexts.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In classics, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Classics, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of classics. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

This book explores Callimachus' allusive practice in his Aetia prologue and Hymns 4, 5, and 6, and in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The study includes an overview of modern approaches to poetic allusion, a close (re-)examination of the lexical allusions in the Aetia's and Metamorphoses' prologues, extensive examinations of allusive techniques within selections of these works, the poets' use of "signposting" and "authorization" techniques, and the relationship between allusion and genre.

This volume is concerned with aspects of orality and literacy in the ancient world. It arises from the tremendous contemporary interest among scholars in questions of how literacy and orality co-exist and interact in the ancient world. The contents of the book are refereed papers originally presented at the fifth biennial 'Orality and Literacy in ancient Greece' held at The University of Melbourne in 2002. Papers are offered by scholars from Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia which deal with a range of periods and genres in antiquity, from Homer through to Roman literature. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the ancient world.