Consisting of individual studies of the poet Pindar's 11 odes for the victors of the athletic contests on Aigina, the author addresses questions of mythicself-presentation in this book, as well as Pindar's techniques for unifying his audience and leading it into a shared experience of inspired success.

This book consists of individual studies of Pindar's eleven odes for Aiginetan victors, preceded by a brief survey of the history of the island and the nature of its aristocracy. Anne Pippin Burnett's discussion is particularly attentive to questions of mythic self-presentation, as exemplified in the pedimental sculptures of the Aphaia Temple and the parallel `narrative' sections of the odes. The overall concern is with Pindaric techniques for unifying an audience and leading it into a shared experience of inspired success, but there is also a concern with the realities of athletic contest and its celebration.

You've just won the gold medal, what are you going to do? In Ancient Greece, your patron could throw a feast in your honor and have a poet write a hymn of praise to you. The great poet Pindar composed many such odes for victorious athletes. Esteemed classicist Anne Pippin Burnett presents a fresh and exuberant translation of Pindar's victory songs. The typical Pindaric ode reflects three separate moments: the instant of success in contest, the victory night with its disorderly revels, and the actual banquet of family and friends where the commissioned poem is being offered as entertainment. In their essential effect, these songs transform a physical triumph, as experienced by one man, into a sense of elation shared by his peers—men who have gathered to dine and to drink. Athletic odes were presented by small bands of dancing singers, influencing the audience with music and dance as well as by words. These translations respect the form of the originals, keeping the stanzas that shaped repeating melodies and danced figures and using rhythms meant to suggest performers in motion. Pindar's songs were meant to entertain and exalt groups of drinking men. These translations revive the confident excitement of their original performances.

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. -

A groundbreaking study of the interaction of poetry, performance, and the built environment in ancient Greece. Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Classics by the Association of American Publishers In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. At the heart of the book is the great poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his magnificent odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre of modern lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by choruses of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further to show that they were also site-specific: as the dancers moved through the space of a city or a sanctuary, their song would refer to local monuments and landmarks. Part of Pindar's brief, they argue, was to weave words and bodies into elaborate tapestries of myth and geography and, in so doing, to re-imagine the very fabric of the city-state. Pindar's poems, in short, were tools for making sense of space. Recent scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology. But Neer and Kurke show that these distinctions are artificial. Poems, statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and buildings worked together as a "suite" of technologies for organizing landscapes, cityscapes, and territories. Studying these technologies in tandem reveals the procedures and criteria by which the Greeks understood relations of nearness and distance, "here" and "there"—and how these ways of inhabiting space were essentially political. Rooted in close readings of individual poems, buildings, and works of art, Pindar, Song, and Space ranges from Athens to Libya, Sicily to Rhodes, to provide a revelatory new understanding of the world the Greeks built—and a new model for studying the ancient world.

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.

The 6th/5th century bce Greek melic (or songwriting) poet Pindar was the most celebrated lyricist of antiquity. His famous victory odes offer a paean to the heroic athlete, and are an attempt to encapsulate, through choral songs of acclamation, the glory of the sportsman's moment of triumph at a variety of Panhellenic festivals including the Olympic Games. His other poems, collected in thirteen books, are largely lost or fragmentary - except for the Paeans - but were devoted to the praise of gods and heroes. Yet Pindar, though still respected, is now considered a difficult poet, and is sometimes dismissed as a reactionary. In this wideranging introduction, Richard Stoneman shows that Pindar's works, even where they seem obscure, follow a logic of their own and 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 mortality. Theauthor examines questions of performance and genre; patronage; imagery; and reception, from Horace to the twentieth century.

Of all the lyric poets of ancient Greece, Pindar is the one whose work has been best preserved. His odes to victorious Greek athletes were entertainments designed for performance in a hospitable atmosphere of drinking, dining and jokes. The victor has known the favour of the god whose contest he entered, and has brought back pan-Hellenic fame to his family, friends and city. To extend this glory and make it permanent, he has commissioned a song of praise, had dancers trained to sing it, and summoned an audience of kinsmen, neighbours and friends to enjoy it. Pindar's odes contain invocations and prayers, but their most characteristic effects are achieved thhrough the depiction of fragments of myth. Anne Pippin Burnett argues that these passages were meant neither as mere decoration nor as moral instruction, but served rather as a dramatic mechanism by which dancers brought an experience of another world to guests gathered in the banqueting suite of the victor.

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.