Naming, Truth, and Creation in the Poetics of Pindar

Abstract

The numerous and important studies in early Greece by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne have taught us to recognize the mental and cultural operations beneath the surface of explicit statement in archaic poetry. Their work also casts light on what we may call the mythical poetics of archaic Greece. Their books and essays on memory, on the poet as a master of truth, on the shifting roles of guile [metis] in relation to cosmogony, poetry, technology, power, and intelligence have brilliantly illuminated the underlying assumptions and practices of Homer, Hesiod, Alcman, Simonides, and many others. As Vernant has shown in Aspects mythiques de la memoire et du temps, the poet's power of commemoration enables him to cross the boundaries between the living and the dead, between the past and the present [Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs 87]. In a much cited section of Les maitres de verite dans la Grace archarque [22ff.], Detienne demonstrates that truth [aletheia] of archaic Greek poetry does not correspond to veracity in the modern sense of truthfulness, but rather forms part of a system of oppositions important to the values of an oral culture: preservation versus oblivion, light versus darkness, praise versus blame. What is truthful for the archaic poet is not so much what is factually exact as what successfully resists the corrosive darkness of forgetting. Pindar's poetry stands at a point of transition between an oral and a written culture. This is also the transition between the traditional, past-oriented archaic society, much of whose intellectual energy is expended in maintaining through memory the communal records and the accumulated lore of the past, and the growing critical spirit of the Sophistic movement, whose major efforts are directed toward challenging the past and rethinking traditional wisdom. At such a crisis a traditional poet like Pindar is particularly concerned to probe the meaning of Truth and to deepen its archaic significance as A letheia, the force of the poetic voice that vanquishes the forgetting of heroic deeds.'