Pindar Research Articles

A VISION OF THE NEW JERUSALEM: THE TEXT OF STRIGGIO’S ECCE BEATAM LUCEM

Striggio’s forty-part motet Ecce beatam lucem survives in a unique manuscript source, dated 1587, in the Ratsschulbibliothek in Zwickau. Its text, first published in 1595, formed part of a Pindaric ode written by the neo-Latin poet and Calvinist Paul Schede Melissus (1539–1602). A closer consideration of Melissus’ biography indicates that he probably wrote it after 1575, long after the wedding festivities with which the motet has habitually been associated (Florence, 1565; Munich, 1568). Its subject matter – a Calvinist vision of the New Jerusalem – also makes it an unlikely wedding text and inappropriate for Catholic festivities. Rather, it was probably used as the text of a contrafactum, for an as yet unidentified occasion, with which Striggio himself had little or no connection.

VIRGIL'S CALLIMACHEAN PINDAR: KINGSHIP AND THE BABY IAMUS IN ECLOGUE 4.23–5

AbstractThis article argues for an allusion in Virgil's Eclogue 4 to one of Pindar's victory odes (Olympian 6). It will be suggested that this Pindaric pretext is viewed by the Latin poet through a Callimachean perspective which adds to it further layers of significance. Consequently, the evidence will be discussed for reading the allusion in terms of royal ideology which places Virgil's poem in the tradition of Hellenistic ruler-encomia.

The augment use in the five oldest Odes of Pindar

In this short article I discuss the augment use in Pindar's five oldest Odes (based on the text of the editions by Snell & Maehler' in the Teubner and Race in the Loeb), namely Pythian 10 (498 BC), Pythian 6 (490), Pythian 12 (490), Olympian 14 (488, if correctly dated) and Pythian 7 (486). As the augment use in Pindar has never been studied in detail before and commentaries often do not mention it, I use the observations made for epic Greek as basis, more specifically that the augment is used to refer to foregrounded actions and actions in the recent past, and that it remains absent when actions in a remote or mythical past are related. I start by outlining these observations, then I determine which (un)augmented forms in Pindar are secured by the metre (the transmission of Pindar's Odes has not been unproblematic) and at the end apply the epic observation to the metrically secure forms of these five Odes. My investigation will show that the verb forms referring to the near-deixis (the victor's deeds, his origins and those of his city and the mythical characters with whom he is compared), are augmented, whereas the forms referring to other (mythical) actions remain unaugmented, but, as was the case with epic Greek, there are nevertheless also exceptions.

Kinds of Ode: A Comparative Study

This paper brings a comparative analysis of three types of ode poems, i.e., the Pindaric, Horatian and Irregular odes. Its major focus is on the evolutionary changes of odes from its inception at Grecian to English Romantic odes which were greatly influenced by many like Roman influence, Italian influence, Renaissance and Romantic period etc. Moreover the paper gives a clear picture of ode poetry, its characteristics, form and structure and the functions of each type. Through a comparative study the distinct characteristics of the three types are explicated. Some of the ode poems of English poetry such as “The progress of Poesy: A Pindaric ode” by Thomas Grey, “Ode on Solitude” by Alexander Pope and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats have been taken as the English models of the three kinds respectively. These poems where compared with the original classical models and critically analyzed.

The Romantic Ode and the Art of Brinkmanship

Cet article réévalue l’ode romantique à travers le concept de brinkmanship (stratégie de la corde raide) conçu par Edward Young en 1728 et relancé et développé par Coleridge. Young dépeint l’ode pindarique comme un genre à risque qui semble sauvage et « imméthodique », mais qui « a autant de logique au fond, qu’Aristote ou qu’Euclide ». Coleridge élabore cette « logique » poétique et fait de l’idée de forces mentales conflictuelles mais harmonisées une partie de sa théorie de l’imagination. Ses spéculations critiques illuminent sa propre écriture d’odes et celle d’autres poètes romantiques qui utilisent le genre de manière autoréflexive, pour tester les limites de l’imagination et explorer son fonctionnement. L’article se concentre sur l’« Intimations Ode » de Wordsworth et l’« Ode to a Nightingale » de Keats, soulignant leur audace imaginative, leur déploiement stratégique de dispositifs pindariques tels que les transitions, les apostrophes et les paradoxes, et leur audacieuse intertextualité. Les aspects des odes de Keats normalement considérés comme des signes de retenue horatienne sont interprétés à la place comme des manifestations distinctives de la technique du pindarisme.

PINDAR AND AEGINETAN VIRTUES: NATURALIZING MONEY

Pindar's odes for Aeginetan victors revolve around two major Aeginetan virtues: inborn excellence (phya) and generous guest-friendship (xenia). The latter virtue is, of course, one of the most pervasive themes in Pindar's poetry, in which the poet's relationship with his patrons is presented in terms of guest-friendship, with the odes themselves as the poet's gift to his guest-friends. As for the former virtue, the Aeginetans’ inborn excellence is implicit in the mythic section of almost all Aeginetan odes, which focuses on the line of Aiakos, the progenitor of two of the greatest Greek heroes, Achilles and Ajax. In view of this almost exclusive emphasis, one might be forgiven for assuming that the Aiakidai were the mythical progenitors of the Aeginetans. However, this is simply not true, as Pindar himself was fully aware: in fact, the Aeginetans were a Doric tribe whose ancestry was no more remarkable than that of other Doric cities; at best, they could claim the Aiakidai as their ancestors only metaphorically.

J.H. Prynne’s romanticism: Wordsworth and the dawn of neoliberalism

ABSTRACT This essay is an account of J.H. Prynne’s uses of and references to British romantic poetry in his poems of the 1960s and 1970s. Prynne used and thought through British romantic poetry, especially the poetry of Wordsworth, as a way of imagining alternative social relations to those of capitalism during these decades. Prynne’s relationship to romanticism changes abruptly in the late 1970s when the accumulation of capital began to stabilise and the epoch of neoliberalism began. British romanticism at this point was becoming one part of a nationalist and racist symbolic imaginary proper to Thatcherism. Inextricably linked to this wish to imagine and create alternative social relations is a preoccupation with one of the central forms of romantic poetry: the mid-length irregular (Pindaric) ode, which predominates in Prynne’s major collections of this period. In studying this aspect of Prynne’s writing in relation to the 1960s and 1970s, this essay is concerned with what I would call historical materialist poetics. Historical poetics is the study of poems at the intersection of the history of techniques, the discourses of aesthetics and evolving modes of critical mediation; a historical materialist poetics would also understand these in terms of shifting relations of production.

Magisterial Writing Experiment

Magisterial Writing Experiment Henry Sussman (bio) Sonnets Walter Benjamin Carl Skoggard, ed. and trans. Publication Studio Hudson www.publicationstudio.biz/books 394 Pages; Print, $20.00 Decades before Jacques Derrida bestowed écriture upon the critical world, this a radical whose downbeat on inscriptive media trumped the set-pieces of disciplined discourse, Walter Benjamin plied the turbulent currents of what can be best described as a General Writing. With respect to his own writing practice, particularly after the Habilitationsschrift debacle of 1925, Benjamin revels at the frontiers of a writerly polymorphous perversity. A scriptural hermit crab, he simply luxuriated in the squatter's life, taking up residence in one writerly ecology after the next, making, with a vengeance, its formal constraints, as its idiosyncrasies, his own. Not only is the cycle of seventy-three sonnets that Benjamin, over a ten-year period, dedicated to his youthful intime, Christoph Friedrich Heinle, a labor of love. So is their recent English-language translation, illuminated both by an informative prefatory essay and by meticulous notes on each and every work, by Carl Skoggard. It was with "Fritz" Heinle that Benjamin shared the inebriating joy, at Freiburg and in Berlin, of his first mature independence. Heinle, sensing mega-turbulence in the offing, together with his lover, Rika Seligson, asphyxiated himself just at the outbreak of World War I (on August 8, 1914 in Berlin). Under Skoggard's loving care, the Sonnets emerge as an integral niche within the sprawling cathedral of Benjamin's multifarious lifetime writing-adventure. In his illuminating essay, Skoggard accounts for the dominant features that he encountered in rendering the Sonnets' singular landscape: the truncated rhythm, the eyeopening caesurae, "long-breathed enjambments," "sprung syntax," and the interlinear stutter-steps proceeding directly from Benjamin's translation theory. Skoggard's translations themselves lavish as painstaking care on the details of rhyme, meter, scansion, and syntax as they do to the broader mythological and historical frameworks just as indispensable to the Sonnets' productive assimilation. The sonnet cycle dedicated to Heinle was, first and foremost, very much of a piece with Benjamin's unflagging commitment to General Writing. For the subgroups that the Sonnets invariably form as the reader explores the contours of their body correspond to the compelling subgenres of elucidation and theoretical oversight resulting from the diverse discursive occasions of Benjamin's critical prose. Benjamin was neither "slumming" nor launched on a paean of aesthetic exaltation when he devoted a significant block of writing-time to a sonnet cycle in turn dedicated to a comrade with whom he shared "full-service" friendship, ranging from shared undergraduate jaunts and aesthetic takes on the contemporary to idealized love. In composing the Sonnets, as in devising a modernist urban patois and display for One-Way Street (1928), as in reformatting supersized Proustian autobiography to the specifications of a Berlin Childhood Circa 1900 (1950), Benjamin is once again appropriating, in the full philosophical sense of the word, a traditional compositional format, in this case a highly over-determined one, to his multifarious writing practice. Along the way, he significantly gestures to all the traditional literary art forms that might be implicated by such a pitched twentieth-century poetic lament: classical mythology, epic, elegy, prayer, mystical revelation. But the Sonnets, for all the devotion and intimacy toward Heinle with which they are infused (along with the melancholy evolving over time into the telling Benjaminian mood) are less mourning-pageant than magisterial writing experiment, undertaken both with the conceptual rigor and stunning improvisation embedded in his signature. The cycle of the Sonnets, in sum, may be regarded as a modernist kaleidoscope refracting not only Benjamin's literary fascinations, but the turbulent battleground of his (often antithetical) lifetime friendships. For décor, a significant subgrouping of the poems depends on classical mythological trappings emanating from any number of sources. Chief of these, as Skoggard is well-aware, may be the still-recent rediscovery of Hölderlin, as filtered through the George Circle, triggered by an edition of the Pindaric odes and a separate study by Norbert von Hellingrath. The mythology attached to Heinle's truncated potential, the epic scale of the feelings between him and Benjamin, emerge with particular lucidity...

Hieron and Zeus in Pindar

Hieron and Zeus in Pindar

Republican Liberty and the Pindaric Genealogy of Modern Abstractions

Pindaric odes written around the time of the French Revolution have a penchant for abstractions. Apostrophized Liberty, Fortune, Virtue, and Joy, which replaced the monarch as the ode’s addressee, attest to the numinous prehistory of distinctively modern concepts that Reinhart Koselleck termed “collective singulars.” In particular, eighteenth-century Pindarics put forward representations of Liberty prevailing over an unenlightened past, which conform to the schema of victorious encounter established in Pindar’s epinician odes. The article dwells closely on two ostensibly pro-revolutionary and highly influential texts in the Pindaric mold, Alexander Radishchev’s Liberty and Friedrich Schiller’s To Joy, which share a concept of freedom that diverges from both the republican and the liberal interpretations.

Psyche-Image; or Truth in the Infinitive

ABSTRACTThis essay takes “Ode to Psyche” as its point of departure to explore the “auratics of agnosticism,” an aesthetics of affective disbelief that runs from Shelley and Keats through Pater and Wilde. Keats’s ode to this neglected and belated goddess crystallizes the temporal suspension of Romantic agnosticism. About half-way through De Profundis, Oscar Wilde writes that he would like to “found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Fatherless one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine . Agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints.” “Ode to Psyche” proposes just such a priest in this transfigured form of the Pindaric ode, one that creates a new poetic “dwelling” for the “shadowy thought” of a devoted but unbelieving apostle. Wilde called this “pale-mouth’d prophet” the “preacher of vague and unreal things,” one who builds an auratic temple of disbelief that remains a shrine of Romantic aesthetics.

All Under One Roof by Evelyn Schlag

of Bruce, the ultimate self-actualized man of czarist Russia. Besides this and a couple of other poems with direct Soviet themes, Maxim’s verse tends toward the universal and timeless —it is the poet’s long lens for processing present developments. In “The Hulking Carcass of a Dead Orca” (2010), for example , “The choking scent of rancid fat, / foul and ineffable, will all / but replace the surrounding air. // Weeks will pass, months or years / perhaps, before dwellers from distant climes / discover its bare skeleton. // They will saw it down to small // ornaments , then write on these white / shards about the frailty of living.” He sometimes calls up historical comparisons as a way to characterize our present fraught state, such as in the poem “Homer’s Been Shredded to Quotes”: “Homer’s been shredded to quotes for the billboards: / his scrolls unfurl and spread / to paper the walls, his hexameters bobbing —balloons / we tied to silk threads.” As well, Amelin seems never too far from spiritual awakening. In “Vindictive Goddess, Statue Now Woken,” and giving a nod to the verbose nineteenth-century Russian classicist poet Dmitry Khvostov, he traces the strained trajectory of the poet from the vulgar to the spiritually profound: “How, without breaking into Pindaric odes, / can I stand by on the sidelines? / I’d blow my poetry’s fiery load / on the few years I’m resigned / to. Having removed this pearl—iridescent, / smooth—God gathers it in.” The translations into English collected here have been a decade-long labor of love by Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher. Their exquisite care with these gems has not gone unnoticed—earlier this year, they won the Cliff Becker Book Prize of the American Literary Translators Association for this volume. As the ALTA commendation notes, “There are even places where these translations equal or, perhaps, surpass the original in their crispness and linguistic innovation, making this collection not only a remarkable accomplishment of poetic translation but truly a pleasure to read.” What more do you need to know? This is a volume to treasure. Andrew Singer Trafika Europe Evelyn Schlag All Under One Roof Trans. Karen Leeder. Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2018. 104 pages. When I was very young and growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I was sure that the mountains I saw every day were a massive painting on the side of the universe rather than an actual formation of rocks and dirt. The moment I understood the geology of the place, the world in my mind quickly Omar Pimienta Album of Fences Trans. Jose Antonio Villarán Cardboard House Press This collection is a fascinating combination of poetry (presented in both Spanish and English en face) and photography portraying the duality of living on the US/Mexican border through personal anecdotes and photos. With little punctuation or capitalization, the pieces feel dusty yet hurried, as if rushing to convey meaning against a backdrop of transnational urgency. Seek After: On Seven Modern Lyric Poets Ed. David Baker Stephen F. Austin State University Press Bringing together twenty-five “poetcritics ” of the modern era, this collection seeks the heart of lyric poetry’s seven most prominent writers from England and the US: John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W. S. Merwin. Spanning from the erudite to the everyday, these essays give readers access to the underpinnings of an oftenobtuse art form and, while academic, can give readers a deeper dive into this form and the writers who embody it. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 85 took new shape. The experience of reading Evelyn Schlag’s All Under One Roof follows a similar pattern of discovery, with childlike observations of the situations and places as the speakers of her poems grow in their own personal revelations. The careful translation by Karen Leeder of every aspect of Schlag’s writing is essential in understanding the depth of each image and metaphor, and where some line breaks or punctuation choices seem to clunk with the hammer of language in translation, the overall effect is that of one seeing and experiencing the world for the very first time. In the afterword to this book, Schlag herself writes of an...

, V . ... (Intellectual Discussions About Language, Literature and Society in Athenian Culture 5th Century BC)

Russian Abstract: В работе представлен обзор взглядов на природу языка и литературы в трудах философов, ораторов и историков 5 в. до н.э.: софистов, Демокрита и Геродота. Предпринята попытка доказать, что многие теоретические положения, высказываемые этими авторами, как эстетического, так и философского, религиозного и социально-политического характера. исходно базировались на комментарии к поэтическим (прежде всего, гомеровским) текстам. При этом главной задачей было продемонстрировать внутреннюю непротиворечивость текста и последовательность авторской аргументации. В частности, оказывается, что представления Демокрита о соотношении души и разума могут быть основаны на недошедшем до нас чтении одной гомеровской строки, а концепция «закона» в «Истории» Геродота – на его оригинальном толковании оды Пиндара. English Abstract: The paper provides a review of the views on the nature of language and literature in the writings of philosophers, orators and historians of the 5th century BC: the Sophists, Democritus and Herodotus. An attempt has been made to prove that many of the theoretical positions expressed by these authors are both aesthetic, philosophical, religious and socio-political are originally based on comments on poetic (primarily Homeric) texts. At the same time, the main task of the paper was to demonstrate the internal consistency of the text and the sequence of the author's arguments. In particular, it turns out that the views of Democritus on the relationship between the soul and the mind can be based on the unknown reading of one Homeric line, and the concept of law in the History of Herodotus - on his original interpretation of Pindar's ode.

Uusklassikaline luuletraditsioon varauusaja Tallinnas ja Tartus / Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin poetry in Early Modern Tallinn and Tartu

Uusklassikaline luuletraditsioon varauusaja Tallinnas ja Tartus / Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin poetry in Early Modern Tallinn and Tartu

Votive gifts from Sicily and southern Italy in Olympia and other Greek sanctuaries

Votive gifts from Sicily and southern Italy are most prominent among the objects discovered in Greek sanctuaries, especially Olympia, the most significant location for such material in Greece. Foreign objects from the west were an early focus of archaeologists working on Olympia (for example Karo 1937; Kunze 1951; Kilian 1977a; 1977b; von Hase 1979; 1997; Herrmann 1983; Moustaka 1985; Kyrieleis 1986; Söldner 1994; Strøm 2000; Naso 2000a; 2000b; 2006; 2011; 2012; Baitinger 2013; Aurigny 2016), in particular spectacular pieces with inscriptions, such as two bronze helmets of the central Italian Negau type (Fig. 84) (Egg 1986: 51–61, 198–99, nos 185–86, pls 108, 109a). The inscription confirms the dedication by Hiero I, the tyrant of Syracuse, following his victory over the Etruscans at the naval Battle of Cumae in 474 BC. As we know from Pindar's victory odes and from monuments dedicated at Olympia, the powerful tyrants of Sicily maintained strong links to the sanctuary (for example Philipp 1992; 1994; Giangiulio 1993; Di Vita 2005; Dreher 2013).

“My Rare Wit Killing Sin”: Poems of a Restoration Courtier by Anne Killigrew

Reviewed by: “My Rare Wit Killing Sin”: Poems of a Restoration Courtier by Anne Killigrew Jennifer Brady Anne Killigrew. “My Rare Wit Killing Sin”: Poems of a Restoration Courtier, ed. Margaret J. M. Ezell. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2013. Pp. xv + 165. $27.95 (paper). Published within months of her death from smallpox in June 1685, the Poems of Anne Killigrew have until recently attracted attention chiefly for Dryden’s celebrated Pindaric ode memorializing her [End Page 161] short career as a poet and painter. Many Dryden scholars have found Killigrew’s poetry itself to be of negligible interest. Even Ms. Ezell makes modest claims for the literary merits of Killigrew’s work, arguing that “the single posthumously published volume of Killigrew’s poems, therefore, should be viewed not so much as a final polished product … but as a record of the aspirations and poetic vision of a developing young artist” finding her voice. In her introduction, Ms. Ezell situates Killigrew within the network of a “family of courtiers” strongly loyal to the Stuarts, both during the Interregnum and after the Restoration. It is one of the ironies of Killigrew’s life that her birth in 1660 and death in 1685 should have spanned so precisely the twenty-five-year reign of Charles II, making her an exemplary Restoration writer. In some other respects, however, Killigrew’s was a dissident voice: her poetry is markedly feminocentric in opposition to the masculinist libertine culture that prevailed at court; idealistic and contemptuous of “worldly joys” in an atmosphere of cynical pleasure seeking; and strenuous in advocating a life of retirement over the ambitious pursuits of the “Great Ones … who their Ill-spent time divide, / ’Twixt dang’rous Politics, and formal Pride, / Destructive Vice, [and] Expensive Vanity,” as she characterized the atmosphere at Whitehall. I suspect it was Killigrew’s distaste for the politics of the Restoration court as well as her devout faith that drew Dryden to commemorate her “pious memory.” In Ms. Ezell’s edition of the Poems, the first since a facsimile edition published in 1967, she has sensibly modernized some aspects of the texts to make them more accessible to twenty-first-century readers. Her annotations of the biblical, classical, and historical allusions in Killigrew’s poems establish the young poet’s impressive range of reading and her cultured tastes. Killigrew experimented during her brief career with writing epigrams, occasional poems, pastoral dialogues, elegies, Pindaric odes, and even an abortive epic celebrating Alexander the Great. She had an avid interest in the reception of her work and responded with delight to complimentary verses written about her poetry by Henry Hare, 2nd Baron Coleraine, and, with hurt and outrage, to an unidentified contemporary attacker who claimed “that my Verses were made by another.” “Th’Envious Age, only to Me alone, / Will not allow, what I do write, my Own, / But let ’em Rage, and ’gainst a Maid Conspire,” Killigrew protested, before resolving to “willingly accept Cassandra’s Fate, / To speak the Truth, although believ’d too late.” Ms. Ezell emphasizes the manuscript circulation of these poems among a coterie of readers prior to their posthumous publication by Killigrew’s father and downplays the idea that this may be a consciously fashioned volume because of the circumstances of its publication. The ordering of the poems is nevertheless worth investigating. The volume opens, for example, with a fragment of Killigrew’s abandoned epic, “Alexandreis,” followed by a note explaining that “This was the first Essay of this young Lady in Poetry, but finding the Task she had undertaken hard, she laid it by till Practice and more time should make her equal to so great a Work.” This gloss, presumably by Killigrew’s father and editor, is consistent with Dryden’s portrait of her as a talented “probationer” at the time of her early death. The second poem in the collection, however, suggests a rather different reading of her abandoned epic. “To the Queen,” addressed to Catherine of Braganza, explicitly rejects the epic’s traditional valorizing [End Page 162] of male violence, implying less that Killigrew thought herself incapable of writing an epic on Alexander the Great...

Pindar and the Emergence of Literature by Boris Maslov

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...

¿Qué es la pólis? Una isla (A propósito de la fundación de Cirene en las odas de Píndaro)

The aim of this paper is to outline an interpretation of three Pindaric Odes which recount from three different perspectives the foundation of Kyrene. Besides an analysis of the formal problems that arise from the fact that a melic poem embarks himself in telling a certain story, we consider that the polis grows up from an uprooting movement that crystallizes in the figure of an island, i.e. the land that wanders in the sea. Finally we make some remarks about the founding act itself, paying attention to the presuppositions that make that act difficult to understand for the modern reader.http://dx.doi.org/10.15304/ag.35.1.2318

Trediakovskijs „Ода торжественная о сдаче города Гданска“: Pindarische Ode und syllabischer Vers

One of the major tasks set before Russian poetry in the early 1730s was the necessity of creating the Pindaric ode. There is a widely spread opinion that syllabic versification prevented from solving this task. However, as the analysis of Trediakovsky’s odes undertaken in the following article, shows, the Pindaric ode could have been created with the help of syllabic versification.

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture, 1640–1680Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture, 1640–1680. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix+236.

<i>Elizabeth Scott-Baumann</i> Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture, 1640–1680<i>Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture, 1640–1680</i>. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix+236.