6 ^ 1 TITLE PAGE Title of thesis: STUDIES IN PINDAR By STEPHEN JOHN INSTONE of Bedford College Submitted for the degree of PhD ProQuest Number: 10098488 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10098488 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT of THESIS The bulk of this thesis consists of coimTientaxies on Pindar Pythian 11 and Nemean 2. As a prologue there is a general introduction to Pindar analysing some Pindaric problems, and an analysis of some features of the Pindaric scholia (the ancient commentaries on Pindar). The INTRODUCTION shows now Pindar tailored the mythical parts of his victory odes to suit the occasion, and how the odes do not nicely conform to a general pattern. The second part, TITLES and INSCRIPTIONES in the PINDARIC SCHOLIA and the OCCASION of PYTHIAN ELEVEN, shows that the dates and titles given by the scholia for Pindar’s odes are an unrel­ iable amalgam of bits of information and guesses (often infer­ ences from the odes themselves). The COMMENTARY on PYTHIAN ELEVEN tackles the problem posed by Pindar apparently spatchcocking an irrelevant mythical story about Agamemnon into the ode. It is suggested (l) tne victor’s conquest at the Games has affinities to Orestes’s conquest over his father’s murderers; (2) when Pindar says he went off-course in telling the myth he is being disingenuous; representing what he thinks would be the attitude to the myth of the victor’s family; (3) themes of envy, moderation, success, highlighted in the myth are relevant to the victor. The COMNIENTARY on NEMEAN TWO suggests tnis short ode (like other snort ones) was designed to preface the komos (victory sing-song and celebrations) held for tne victor. The ode’s compressed thought and obscure allusions are unravelled: Orion z following the Pleiades symbolises how the victor may hope to gain a big win at Olympia after his recent little successes; Hector’s submission to Aias is analogous to the submissions gained by the victor over his opponents. Puns and etymologising are shown to be a feature of tne poem. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 4- NOTES TO INTRODUCTION ; TITLES AND INSCRIPTIONES IN THE PINDARIC SCHOLIA AND THE OCCASION OF PYTHIAN ELEVEN 37 COMMENTARY ON PYTHIAN ELEVEN 39 COMMENTARY ON NEMEAN TWO 133 NOTES TO COMMENTARIES 164- (There are 3 plates of ancient Greek athletes between pages 58 and 59) The text of Pindar on wnich this thesis is based is taken from the Teubner edition of B.Snell - H.Maehler, Pindari Carmina cum Fragmentis (Leipzig I960). 3 INTRODUCTION 1. The Classification of Pindar's Odes §1 In the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C. Pindar was 2 famous and held in honour all over the Greek world . Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Alcidamas, Isocrates, Aristophanes, Menander 2 all quotegu him , and he led the Hellenistic canon of nine lyric 3 poets ^2 His output was first (as far as we can tell) classified by Aristophanes of Byzantium^; the epinicians were contained in the last four of the total of 17 books. Even in antiquity, however, it was recognised that some poems among the epinicians had been mis-classified: Inscriptio N.9 (referring to Nemeans 9, 10, 11) eK.i;T^) ^'ï puK&Ti g icI Sio c^Gpo/TQ,/^- c f . U s e r . a. pJ.W O j^ q (][%u u q c , 6 )( p ^ / ioi{T>|/ 'rs^uT»]/ Gic 'rcvc i^i)ccc?c cuVfcUct»i o<J |Gpo/ V6viKv||(-eK The implication of these scholia is that in the First Century B.C. Didymus recognised that Nemeans 9-11 were not epinicians for Nemean victories and had separated them from the other Nemeans. Another piece of evidence for problems in antiquity concerning the classification of Pindar's poems is P.Oxy.2451 A, scraps (probably from a Life of Pindar) forming parts of an ancient commentary on Isthmians and also (P.Oxy. 2451 B fr. 17) on an oc^o cjopito/ c . T L e èc^ocj;o0 ic< were an Athenian festival^. It is a reasonable conjecture that Pindar's formed an appendix to his Isthmians as Nemeans 9-11 did to the other Nemeans^. §4- There was a similar problem of classification over some of Pindar's Partheneia, whether to classify some of them as a third book of Partheneia or as a separate appendix^. What distinguished these TtpOtvërioc we do not know; 8 a scrap of an ancient dispute about them survives in P.Oxy.2438 . §5- These problems in antiquity over the classification of Pindar's poetry should remind us of two things: firstly, the poems which in modern editions are grouped together as epinicians are in many respects a motley collection; secondly, the clear-cut distinctions between genres suggested by classi­ fiers' labels are an anacKnonism^. It is easy to think that because we have four books designated 'epinicians', therefore they are all the same sort of poem; this has led some modern American scholars to try to explain them by reference to a generalised formal model^^. But these claims have not be sub­ stantiated by their authors. (See further below). 2. Recent Pindaric Scholarship §i The idea that for all of Pindar's odes there is a single general theory that explains them (such as the modern American scholars claim to have discovered) can be traced back to the 19th Century work of Boeckh and Dissen^^ and the notion that all the odes can be explained by reference to an underlying central thought or Grundgedanke. The theory led Hermann^^ to reject as irrelevant padding anything not in accord with the hypothetical underlying thought and is a similar sort of theory to the theory of Bundy^^ that all parts of all the odes have a single aim, namely to praise the winner, with parts that do not appear to praise the winner functioning as foils to offset those that do. The Grundgedanke theory was developed, in another direction, also followed by modern scholarship, by the theory of F. Mezger^^ that in each ode there are key repeated words which express the essential thought of the poem (cf. D. C. 17 Young recently : "Mezger's theory of the recurrent word is basically correct (though not in the form in which he gave it) and, I believe, is the greatest single aid for an understan­ ding of a Pindaric ode"^^). The commentaries of Fennell^^ and 2 0 Bury are also strongly influenced by this theory. §3 In a counter-reaction to this trend, the heterogeneity of the odes was strongly emphasised towards the turn of the 21 century by Drachmann who stressed the diversity of the odes' ingredients. This counter-reaction was influenced by a growing interest in trying to establish the diverse historical circum­ stances surrounding each ode's composition. The main proponent 2 2 of this risky historicising approach was Wilamowitz . A result of this counter-reaction was a tendency to see the one part of the poem most obviously not based in documentable history, 23 namely the myth, as an irrelevant digression . Modern discus­ sions of Pythian 11 have largely centred around this view of its myth, on the assumption that when Pindar says (P.11 38-40) he went off course in telling the myth he is admitting to having made a mistake in telling it (a debatable assumption: see my commentary ad loc.). Between these two approaches came the theory of sub­ jective and objective unity advocated by Schadewaldt^^, though first suggested 98 years earlier by Boeckh, according to which each ode had two competing aims, on the one hand to praise the winner and on the other to express -the poet's own personal views. It was Schadewaldt, too, who first drew attention 2 5 to the conventions of epinician poetry as a genre . Schadewaldt's work is important for the understanding of Pythian 11: Pindar's apparent apology for haing told the myth has to be recognised as a conventional rhetorical device on the one hand enabling the poet to change themes, on the other highlighting how there is more to Pindar's odes than just personal praise of the winner; the victor may have wanted Pindar to aim at nothing but victor- praise, but Pindar had other ideas. §5" The importance of understanding the conventions of the genre has recently been underlined by Bundy^^; as mentioned, he insists that praise of the winner was the poet's overriding aim. Some of the dangers inherent in his approach have been well pointed out by Professor Lloyd-Jones in his 1982 lecture 2 7 on Pindar to the British Academy . Three further dangers should be noticed: firstly, one must be cautious before speaking of the conventions of the epinician genre; apart from Pindar and Bacchylides, other representatives of the genre scarcely exist, and Pindar's technique in constructing his epinicians is diffe­ rent enough from Bacchylides ' to make it possible that if more survived of the epinicians of Ibycus and Simonides our views about what should count as a convention of the genre (as opposed to a trait of Pindaric style) would be very diffe­ rent.