The Traffic in Praise CALIFORNIA CLASSICAL STUDIES NUMBER 1 Editorial Board Chair: Donald Mastronarde Editorial Board: Alessandro Barchiesi, Todd Hickey, Emily Mackil, Richard Martin, Robert Morstein-Marx, J. Theodore Peña, Kim Shelton California Classical Studies publishes peer-reviewed long-form scholarship with online open access and print-on-demand availability. The primary aim of the series is to disseminate basic research (editing and analysis of primary materials both textual and physical), data-heavy re- search, and highly specialized research of the kind that is either hard to place with the leading publishers in Classics or extremely expensive for libraries and individuals when produced by a leading academic publisher. In addition to promoting archaeological publications, papyrolog- ical and epigraphic studies, technical textual studies, and the like, the series will also produce selected titles of a more general profile. The startup phase of this project (2013–2015) is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. THE TRAFFIC IN PRAISE Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy Leslie Kurke CALIFORNIA CLASSICAL STUDIES Berkeley, California © 2013 by Leslie Kurke Reprint, with minor corrections, of the edition first published 1991 by Cornell University Press. California Classical Studies c/o Department of Classics University of California Berkeley, California 94720–2520 USA http://calclassicalstudies.org email: [email protected] ISBN 9781939926005 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013938022 CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgments vii Foreword by Gregory Nagy ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Genre, Poetics, and Social Change 1 Part One. The Economy of Kleos: Symbolic Capital and the Household 1. The Loop of Nostos 13 2. The Economics of Nostos 32 3. Funeral Rites and New Birth 55 Part Two. The Economy of Praise in the Aristocratic Community 4. The Ideology of Aristocratic Exchange 73 5. Recompense and Marriage: Models of Community 95 6. Guest-Friends and Guest-Gifts 119 Part Three. Pindar’s Political Economy 7. Adorning the City: The Politics of Megaloprepeia 141 8. Envy and Tyranny: The Rhetoric of Megaloprepeia 169 vi CONTENTS 9. Visible and Invisible Property 195 10. Isthmian 2: The Recuperation of Megaloprepeia 208 Conclusion: Epinikion as Communal Drama 223 Bibliography 228 Index Locorum 241 General Index 247 Preface to 2013 edition It is a strange thing returning to this book after an interval of more than twenty years; it is the product of a different time and essentially of a different author. It seemed best to me therefore not to attempt to make substantive changes to the argument, but rather to leave it intact as I conceived and wrote it when I was in my twenties. I have taken the opportunity of this second (electronic) edition to correct and make more accurate translations from the Greek in several places. And in two separate places, I have changed my mind on the reading of the Greek text of Pindar. (1) At Pythian 9, lines 90–92, I have come to accept the necessi- ty of Hermann’s emendation εὐκλεΐξας for the MSS εὐκλεΐξαι, persuaded by the arguments of G. B. D’Alessio, “First-Person Problems in Pindar,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 1994: 117–139 (at 131–132 n. 47). For this reason, I have slightly altered the argument on pp. 89 and 180 of this edition (= pp. 101 and 208 of the original edition) to conform to this readng of the Greek text. (2) Although it makes no substantive difference to my argument, I would now diverge from the Teubner text of Olympian 2, line 97, to read τὸ λαλαγῆσαι θέλων κρυφόν τε θέμεν ἐσλῶν καλοῖς (retaining the MSS θέλων and τε θέμεν) and translate “[satiety] that wishes to chatter at the instigation of intemperate men and [thereby] to conceal the good deeds of noble men.” I have introduced the changed text and translation on pp. 190–191 of this edition (= pp. 220–221 of the original edition). Thanks to Boris Maslov for calling my attention to this passage, and for discussion of the Greek text. For the original idea of making a new electronic edition of The Traffic in Praise and for the enormous amount of labor, attention, and patience required to pro- duce it, I am deeply indebted to Donald Mastronarde. I also owe a debt of grat- itude to Rachel Lesser and Virginia Lewis for their work scanning, cleaning up, and proofreading the text. Out of a kind of superstitious dread, I sent this book out into the world originally naked, bare of any dedication. I would like to take the opportunity of this second edition to dedicate this (renewed) work to my colleagues Mark Griffith andD onald Mastronarde. It has been an honor and a pleasure to have them as colleagues and friends for more than twenty years; their vii viii acknowledgments example and constant conversation have made me a better Hellenist. The pagination of the 1991 edition is indicated in the text with a vertical bar and numbers between square brackets, thus |[154], placed before the first word of that page. When the original page ended in a hyphenated word, the dividing mark has been positioned after the whole word. Acknowledgments (1991) [xi] I am grateful to my teachers Richard Martin, Anne Carson, and Froma Zeitlin, who guided and meticulously criticized an earlier version of this work. All three have profoundly influenced the way I read and think about texts. I have often had the feeling as I revised that I was exposing the argument that lay just under the surface of what I had written. To Richard Martin, Gregory Nagy, and Rich- ard Hamilton, who understood what I was up to long before I did, I owe special thanks for encouragement and guidance. Many other readers along the way have been generous with their time and insights: Andrew Garrett, Greg Crane, Thomas Cole, Carol Dougherty, Leonard Muellner, Lisa Maurizio, Steven White, and Ian Rutherford. Thanks also to David Halperin for suggesting my title, and to Naomi Rood for her invaluable assistance with the manuscript. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Harvard Society of Fellows, where I wrote the book. In addition to material support, this community furnished an intensely stimulating intellectual environment. For that, I thank Seth Schwartz, Andrew Cohen, Laura Quinney, William Flesch, Joseph Koerner, Lisbet Rausing Koerner, Robin Fleming, Charles Bailyn, Juliet Fleming, Rogers Brubaker, Dwight Reynolds, and Maren Niehoff. Pindar is a difficult author, and therefore any discussion of his work must con- cern itself with basic problems of interpretation. I have tried to relegate all purely philological discussion to the footnotes, where it is available to the specialist, but not intrusive for the general reader. All translations are my own. Their aim is not elegance but merely a literal |[xii] rendition of the sense (insofar as this is possible within the limits of English syntax). I have despaired of consistency in the spelling of Greek words and names. For proper names familiar in their Latinized form (such as Thucydides, Sophocles, and Corinth), I have used that form. For less familiar names and transliterated Greek words, I have followed a compromise system, closer to the Greek spelling, with k for κ, ch for χ, and y for υ. Leslie Kurke |[vii] Foreword Gregory Nagy The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy, by Leslie Kurke, represents a subtle broadening in the scope of the Myth and Poetics series. My goal, as series editor, is to encourage work that helps to integrate literary criticism with the approaches of anthropology and pays special attention to problems con- cerning the nexus of ritual and myth. The first two books in the series, Richard P. Martin’s The Language of Heroes (1989) and my own Greek Mythology and Poetics (1990), set the groundwork for a broadened understanding of the very concepts of myth and ritual as reflected in the specific cultural context of ancient Greek poetics. The Traffic in Praise now expands the horizon further by confront- ing a question so fundamental that it subsumes even the problem of defining the pervasive interaction of myth and ritual in early Greek society. The question is: what exactly is value? Leslie Kurke’s book seeks answers in the poetics of a prime representative of ancient Greek values, a figure who flourished in the first half of the fifth century before our era, the poet Pindar. The poetry of Pindar is represented primarily by the epinikion or victory odes, a body of praise poems composed for choral per- formance on specific occasions celebrating the athletic victories of aristocrats who competed in the Panhellenic games. In this context, myth implies ritual in the very performance of myth by way of poetry. The myths deployed in these compo- sitions of Pindar are in many cases demonstrably relevant to the ritual dimensions of athletics, in that the efforts of athletes participating in the games are viewed as stylized ordeals that serve as ritual compensation for corresponding ordeals endured by heroes in the remote past of myth. The athletes’ ordeals in turn are viewed as requiring the compensation of the |[viii] poet’s creative efforts as realized in the performance of the victory ode, which in its own turn, as praise poetry, re- quires honorific material compensation for the poet. This whole chain of compen- sation, ideologically grounded in myth and realized in ritual, is a matter of value. ix x FOREWORD If there is a single Greek word that can best capture for us such a value, such a driving social force behind Pindar’s poetics, that word is surely oikonomiā, an- cestor of our borrowed English terms economy and economics. For Pindar, oi- konomiā is not merely a material concern—which is what we might have inferred from our usage of economy.