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Pindar's Library: Performance Poetry and Material Texts

Online ISBN:
9780191808166
Print ISBN:
9780198745730
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Pindar's Library: Performance Poetry and Material Texts

Tom Phillips
Tom Phillips

Junior Research Fellow in Classics

Junior Research Fellow in Classics, University of Oxford
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Published online:
17 December 2015
Published in print:
1 November 2015
Online ISBN:
9780191808166
Print ISBN:
9780198745730
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The main focus of this book is on how readers during the Hellenistic period encountered these poems in book form. To this end, it analyses the role played by Pindar’s literary, cultic, and scholarly reception in affecting readers’ engagement with his poetry. But because consideration of the poems as material documents is connected to their roles as performance pieces, the book also examines the poet’s encomiastic techniques, mythical narratives, and paraenetic discourses against the background of the song culture of the fifth century. These chapters argue for an expanded notion of the poems’ aims and concentrate on how they complicate and transcend their social functions. Considerable attention is paid to the poems that begin and end the Olympian and Pythian books. As well as examining the continuities between reading and attending performances, the book highlights elements of readers’ experiences distinctive to Hellenistic culture. Analysis of the scholarly decisions that shaped these editions leads into an exploration of the poems in relation to their places within their respective books, and their reception in Hellenistic culture. Another chapter focuses on the hitherto neglected issue of quotations of poets in ancient commentaries, analysing how such citations influenced readers’ understanding of intertextual relationships. Pindar’s epinicians and the contextual factors that influence their reception are seen throughout in dialogic terms: as well as exerting a powerful influence over subsequent literature, the poems are also recontextualized in ways that shift and extend their cultural significance.

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