Reviewed by: Pindar and the Emergence of Literature by Boris Maslov Chris Eckerman Boris Maslov. Pindar and the Emergence of Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xii + 371 pp. Cloth. $120. This book covers a lot of ground. There is an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue; and the chapters are broken into several subsections. In the chapters, Maslov begins at the macro scale, addressing broad concepts (e.g., authorship) in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory. Thereafter, he generally moves to address the relevant concept in relation to its early Greek context, and he generally ends by addressing the relevant concept in relation to the Pindaric corpus. In this regard, the chapters have an interesting and ambitious shape, but Maslov covers so much material from so many perspectives that the book does not have a cohesive thread of argument running through it (the chapters’ subsections are regularly discrete units). Thus, while admiring Maslov’s zeal to cover so much terrain, I felt that the book would have benefitted if Maslov had given himself a more focused purview. For the sake of coherence, and given the space allotted this review, I focus on those sections that are related to Pindaric criticism, since Maslov privileges Pindaric materials in this book. Moreover, trained as a classical philologist, I address the book from the vantage point of classical philology. I leave it to others to comment on the book’s contribution to studies in comparative literature. In the introduction, Maslov presents several terms that currently play no substantial role in Pindaric studies. The first terms are folklore and literature, which, as Maslov introduces them, seem to me too capacious to be notably useful. We use more specific terminology in epinician criticism to describe literary and cultural phenomena, and the introduction of literature and folklore moves us toward vagueness, as I see it, rather than toward clarity in criticism (note, e.g., Maslov’s interpretation of “folklore” as being relevant to individuals performing a kōmos, 22). Furthermore, although other readers may have a different experience, I did not find that Maslov’s use of the terms “literature” and “folklore” in later chapters opened up familiar texts in meaningful ways. It should be noted, moreover, that Maslov’s interest in “literature” in relation to Pindar is not especially novel (see, e.g., S. Shankman, In Search of the Classic: Reconsidering the Greco-Roman Tradition, Homer to Valéry and Beyond, 79–123 [University Park, 1994]). Maslov closes the introduction by introducing the terms “stratigraphy” from archaeology and “sedimentation” from geology into Pindaric studies. For Maslov, “‘a stratigraphic poetics’ is a method of reading that stratifies a literary work into diachronically distinct elements” (9), and sedimentation, following Veselovsky, refers to “strata of meaning accumulated during cultural evolution” [End Page 541] (25). In the introduction, Maslov does not put the terms stratigraphy and sedimentation to work in such a way that their value to epinician studies becomes obvious, and, as the book progressed, I did not find that the terms opened up familiar texts in noteworthy ways. The first chapter is devoted to authorship, and Maslov is interested in questions of authorship as they relate to epinician odes in performance; and, within this context, Maslov assumes that epinician odes were performed by choruses (e.g., 91 et passim). Like many scholars, Maslov is interested in the problem as to why epinician texts frequently are framed from the perspective of the poet as speaker, assuming that the odes were performed by choruses. Such voicing is only a problem, however, if we know that the odes were all performed by choruses. I note that the “choral hypothesis” remains a hypothesis and that any argumentation built upon the assumption of the validity of the choral hypothesis is subject to critique if it is unsound; as scholars have noted, the Pindaric corpus provides strong evidence in favor of several passages of Pindaric odes being performed by a soloist. Indeed, as Michel Briand and I have recently noted, there is no sure reason to assume that epinician odes were performed solely by a chorus or solely by a soloist: there is good reason to think that some epinician odes were...
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Jul 1, 2016
Richard Hunter 
