Slander's bite:Nemean7.102-5 and the language of invective

Abstract

AbstractDiscussion of the closing lines of Pindar's seventhNemeanhas concentrated almost exclusively on the lines' relevance to the larger question that hangs over the poem: does the ode serve as an apologia for the poet's uncomplimentary treatment of Neoptolemus in an earlierPaean, and is Pindar here most plainly gainsaying the vilification in which he supposedly previously engaged. The reading that I offer suggests that a very different concern frames the conclusion to the work. Rather than seeking to exculpate himself, the poet announces instead that in the song that the audience has just heard, the composer has adhered to two prime virtues that the encomiastic genre should embrace:variatioand an ability to counter the language of blame. By reorienting the debate in this way, I aim to elucidate the striking metaphors and other rhetorical devices that fill the final lines, and most particularly to make sense of the canine imagery that seems so recurrent a motif. As my reading seeks to show, the dog is chosen as master trope both for his relation to the practice of invective and for his relevance to that stale act of repetition that the poet here rejects. By giving his audience a sample of the mode of speech that the calumnist practises, and that the praise poet may appropriate when combating the opposite genre, Pindar makes the merits of his own poetry shine the brighter, and invites thecognoscentito appreciate hissophia. More broadly, the encomiastic singer's brief deployment of the weapons of the abuse poet allows us to understand something of the overlapping and symbiotic relations between the different genres in archaic Greek poetry.