Pindar’s Songs for Young Athletes of Aigina (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pindar’s Songs for Young Athletes of Aigina Joel Lidov Anne Pippin Burnett. Pindar’s Songs for Young Athletes of Aigina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 276. $90.00. ISBN 0-19-927794-X. Choral singing and dancing enchant. So Burnett here (cf. the “magical power” of the “choral mode” in her Art of Bacchylides). Singing in unison, the performers draw the audience into a unity of thought and feeling that confers a sense of the sacred on the present moment and blends it with the miracles of an ancestral past as part of a timeless experience. In epinician performances, the chorus, through a mimesis of the joy and wonder that greets success, creates this enchantment as thanks to the god and the family who provided the community with the gift of victory that made it possible. As they do so, the performers explain and confirm the identity of the community and the leadership of those who occasioned and commissioned the performance. On this foundation, Burnett constructs a reading of Pindar’s eleven odes for Aiginetan victors, all of whom, she claims (despite the absence of firm evidence in a few cases), were adolescents. She has no patience for the discovery of bits of biography in the odes, and no enthusiasm for the recent revival of historicist explanations of Pindar’s transitions or choices of emphasis. She assumes that the odes are sequential compositions that work their effect on the audience through a readily understood progression that incorporates generically determined elements, but she does not offer rhetorical analyses of them as freestanding compositions. Quite the contrary, she interprets the songs as responses to the circumstances of their performance, as constituted by the make-up, beliefs, and practices of the immediate community. The advantage of studying the Aiginetan odes together is that these circumstances are a constant. She sketches them in the opening three chapters: first, the newly enriched oligarchs who found their charter by elaborating the myth of the Aiakids—Burnett envisions a primary audience of wealthy symposiasts (it is not clear whether she admits the broader public as spectators, but she takes the references to the polis to confirm the patrons’ civic role); second, the installation, after 490, of new pediments on the Aphaia temple, which can be reconstructed to represent the two expeditions to Troy centered on Athena—she presents this as proof of the myth’s importance to the Aiginetans and argues that Pindar engaged in a kind of dialogue with the work of the sculptors (I admire throughout her incorporation of visual evidence for the history and variants of myth, but her emphasis on the temple seems unnecessary; the appearance of the Aiakids appear in all eleven odes is evidence enough, and there is no need to invent a dialogue just because Pindar makes Zeus and not Athena central to his version of the stories); third, the moral and physical education of an Aiginetan youth as a process of initiation—she takes this as the key to the representation both of the victors and, through the songs’ ethopoieia, of the choruses. Each of the eleven chapters devoted to the odes begins with a Greek text (without apparatus, apparently based on Bowra and unfortunately marred by [End Page 187] occasional typos) and a translation. The translations, which aim to capture the flow of thought line by line, often bring the text to life: “We live day by day. Someone, no one—what are they?” In each essay, her belief that the myth is united with the present action leads her to find it analogous in detail, always including a miraculous event and usually an initiate’s progress. This search for organic connection too often forces her into tendentious readings; sometimes she subordinates or abandons an ode’s internal rhetorical developments (the error was anticipated and described by W. Slater, CA 2 [1983] 129–132), sometimes she imposes on Pindar’s narrative an evaluation not justified in the ode itself. So a gnome on variety (“nothing is equally a pleasure among men”), introducing a new topic, acquires a demonstrative and an explanation point in translation in order to convert the close of the previous...