Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C. by Kathryn A. Morgan, and: The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire by Nigel Nicholson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C. by Kathryn A. Morgan, and: The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire by Nigel Nicholson David G. Smith Kathryn A. Morgan. Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xix + 460 pp. Cloth, $85.00. Nigel Nicholson. The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xix + 353 pp. Cloth, $74.00. The Greek west in general and Deinomenid Syracuse in particular provide an alternative to Athenocentric assumptions that Greek culture coalesces primarily in an Aegean milieu. Nevertheless, with the exception of Freeman (1891–94), Dunbabin (1948), and Finley (1968), there has been a relative dearth of English-language monographs on these regional contexts. With new books from Kathryn Morgan and Nigel Nicholson (and Franco De Angelis’ 2016 Archaic and Classical Sicily: A Social and Economic History in the same series), this limitation is now decisively lifted. For those drawn to the period, teachers have something to assign that was written in the current millennium, and students looking for a guide to the period’s sources will find them thoroughly documented. There is not much new literary or archaeological evidence for the historical narrative. Morgan briefly adduces the Aeschylean “Dikē” fragment (but not the corresponding “Eirēnē” fragment). The Himera battleground cemetery unearthed in 2008 is discussed in neither account of how Deinomenid monarchs constructed victory. On the other hand, both books foreground their use of the largest surviving corpus of literary texts dealing with the period and region—Pindar and the traditions surrounding epinician poetry, which are seductive evidence for Greeks outside Athens. Morgan’s treatment of this material results in a thick description of the relationship between Hieron and Pindar that remains idiosyncratic to them, whereas Nicholson’s provides a historicized structuralist account of the relationship between epinician traditions with potential applicability to other contexts. Their most salient difference is that Nicholson’s Pindar responds more directly to performance conditions whereas Morgan’s seems freer in expressing his personal support and poetic agency. As the titles suggest, this makes Poetics a book about history and genre and Construction a book about a poet. Despite their differences, both books have adopted a similar structure. Morgan’s opens with a summary of her approach to Pindaric epinician as a poetry “refining and concentrating a vision of monarchy for a world where kings were becoming unfashionable” (22). Nicholson’s first introduces the genre of hero-athlete oral narrative and then describes its ideological interrelationship with the competing commemorative genres of sculpture and epinician. The middle [End Page 729] of each book reviews standard evidence for the Deinomenids (Morgan 23–86, Nicholson 79–85)—i.e., manipulation of groups and individuals, monumental architecture, athletic participation, dedication, coinage—and their patronage of epinician traditions (Morgan 87–132, Nicholson 85–98). The remainder of each book is structured by five case study chapters. Nicholson’s juxtapose epinician and hero-athlete material from a particular polis: Hagesidamus and Euthymus from Epizephyrian Locri, Astylus and Philippus from Croton, Glaucus and Glaucus from Gelon’s Syracuse, Ergoteles and Tisander from Hieron’s Syracuse and the period thereafter, and finally, Alexidamus of Metapontum. Morgan’s case studies, prefaced by Greek texts and English translations, focus on individual poems: Olympian 1; Pythians 1, 2, and 3; and Nemean 1 and 9 and Olympian 6 together for “henchmen.” While Morgan is limited to epinician and therefore, despite her title, largely to Hieron, Nicholson is able to devote an entire chapter to Gelon (the first since Dunbabin), treating Hieron with the following period as a separate unit. Morgan’s book announces itself as “an effort to read Pindar’s poetry for Hieron of Syracuse through the lens of its Sicilian, and specifically Syracusan, context” (1), and further specifies that the Syracusan context in question is defined by Pindar’s concerns with how to situate Hieron in the renewed Greek debate about good (Croesus) and bad (Phalaris) leadership after the Persian Wars have problematized autocracy (3). How did...