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Copyright by Kyle Austin Sanders 2018 The Dissertation Committee for Kyle Austin Sanders Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: Pindar and the Enigmatic Tradition Committee: ____________________________________ Thomas Hubbard, Supervisor ____________________________________ Deborah Beck ____________________________________ Lesley Dean-Jones ____________________________________ Ayelet Haimson Lushkov ____________________________________ Joshua Katz Pindar and the Enigmatic Tradition by Kyle Austin Sanders Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2018 Acknowledgments The germ of this project came in a graduate seminar on Pindar offered by Thomas Hubbard, whose expertise and guidance has informed every step of this process. I have also benefited from the lively discussion and feedback of many fellow graduate students. I am especially grateful to my colleague and dear friend Laura Takakjy, who closely read countless drafts over breakfasts at Kerbey Lane. I thank as well the numerous friends and fellow graduate students at Texas, including Chuck Oughton, Paul Hay, and the others in our dissertation reading group, who advised on preliminary versions of several chapters. My time in graduate school would surely not have been so productive and enriching were it not for the wide-ranging acumen and camaraderie of Matt Sibley and Olga Koutseridi. I deeply appreciate the contributions of my dissertation committee, whose careful feedback greatly shaped the later revisions I made to this project. Joshua Katz was very generous in commenting on the manuscript and in travelling to Austin to attend my defense. I must also thank the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts for fellowship support and the Dept. of Classics for its generosity in awarding fellowships over the years, including many travel stipends, one of which allowed me to present an early version of part of this study at the 2017 Society for Classical Studies meeting in Toronto. More broadly, I also want to acknowledge the pivotal role that several of my teachers played in spurring me on to pursue the study of Classics. Jeanne Neumann and Keyne Cheshire, my wonderful undergraduate professors at Davidson College, continue to inspire me as model scholar-teachers. I owe Peter Krentz a great debt for shepherding my sophomore study abroad program around the Mediterranean, a trip on which I decided to become a classics major. Finally, I trace my initial passion for ancient languages back to the sparkling wit and tireless efforts of my high school magistra, Linda Renick. I thank my family in Florida and South Dakota for their understanding and encouragement over the years and Hugo, whose love of perambulation and scenic vistas probably kept me sane. Most of all, I am indebted to my wife Hannah for her unconditional support and all the charis she has deposited in me and for me over what has been a very long haul. iv Abstract Pindar and the Enigmatic Tradition by Kyle Austin Sanders, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 SUPERVISOR: Thomas Hubbard As an object of study, Pindar and riddles may seem a natural union of text and subject matter, since Pindar’s poetry is often judged by modern critics to be obscure. However, the notion of Pindar’s obscurity, a late critical development, says more about our own poetic tastes than the about cultural systems which produced epinician poetry. Contra Aristotle, speaking enigmatically in the ancient world did not constitute a lack or excess of signification but rather a specific and often successful mode of communication that was performed and enjoyed by many different kinds of Greek speakers. Therefore, by describing the Pindaric text in relation to the tradition of speaking enigmatically, my aim is not to “solve” the text. Rather, this study aims to further the valuable work of describing two kinds of associative networks in epinician poetry: logical structure and social meaning. As regards the first, I argue that enigmatic speech in Pindar is marked speech, which means that the text actively engages in signaling to the performance audience that it is enigmatic by devices such as narrative framing, signpost words, tropes such as the “cognitive road,” and the construction of an enigmatic speaker. On the second, I follow recent approaches to Pindar’s poetry which take seriously the social embeddedness of choral lyric. Thus I argue that the performance of enigmatic speech stages a series of dialogues: literary (Ch. 1), elite (Ch. 2), and communal (Ch. 3). Overall, the study advances a view of enigmatic speech, not as obscurity or window dressing, but as an expressive mode of speech that put diverse texts, individuals, and communities in conversation with one another. v Table of Contents Conventions and Abbreviations ................................................................................................... viii Introduction: An Enigmatic Tradition ............................................................................................ 1 A. Contexts .................................................................................................................................. 5 1. Traces of the Greek Riddle Contest ..................................................................................... 5 2. Divine Interpretation and ainigma ..................................................................................... 10 3. Children, divinity, and ainigmata ...................................................................................... 19 B. Features ................................................................................................................................. 33 1. Wordplay/Etymologizing .................................................................................................. 34 2. Elemental Sequences ......................................................................................................... 39 3. Fable and Ainos ................................................................................................................. 41 4. Dialogue............................................................................................................................. 42 C. Argument Summary ............................................................................................................. 43 Chapter 1: Enigmatic Speech as Literary Dialogue ...................................................................... 46 A. Nemean 7: True Names and the Unity of Opposites ............................................................ 48 1. Life as Light and Darkness: Sogenes or Thearion? ........................................................... 51 2. Homeric Dialogue .............................................................................................................. 58 3. Dikē as the Mean ............................................................................................................... 60 4. Pindar’s Muse: Ivory, gold, and a kenning ........................................................................ 62 5. The Life of Neoptolemus; the Death of Homer ................................................................. 68 B. Nemean 6: Ainigma Praising Literary Tradition .................................................................. 76 Chapter 2: Enigmatic Speech as an Elite Discourse ..................................................................... 86 A. Olympian 6: True Names & Elite Discourse........................................................................ 89 B. Bacchyl. 3.83-94 ................................................................................................................. 104 C. Hybrid Dialogues: Elite and Literary ................................................................................. 107 1. Olympian 2 and Aesopic Fable ....................................................................................... 107 2. Pythian 9 and the Riddling Contest ................................................................................. 117 Chapter 3: Enigmatic Speech and Communal Dialogue ............................................................. 128 A. Rejection of Divine Interpretation ...................................................................................... 129 1. Olympian 12 .................................................................................................................... 129 2. Nemean 11 ....................................................................................................................... 132 vi B. Communal Authority: Pythian 4 ........................................................................................ 135 C. Staging Deliberation: Pythian 11 ........................................................................................ 142 D. Communal Authority and Child Riddling: Pythian 8.39-55 .............................................. 158 Epilogue: Synthesis and Mutability ............................................................................................ 166 O 1.1-13 Hybrid Dialogue: Literary, Elite, Communal .......................................................... 167 Appendix: Wordplay in Pindar ................................................................................................... 175 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................................
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