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A Companion to Greek Lyric


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See Cingano 2005: 124–127. Wedding disasters include the quarrel of the Lapiths and Centaurs (Il. 1.260–73), the Trojan War—at least three times! first with Menelaos (Hes. frr. 196–204 M–W), then Paris (Cypria arg. 19–20 B), and then Deiphobos (Little Iliad arg. 10, fr. 4 B; cf. Alcaeus fr. 289.12)— and the slaughter of the suitors in the Odyssey.

      48 48 Cf. Burgess 2012: 176–182; Anderson 1997: 54–56.

      49 49 For detailed treatment, see especially Finglass (Chapter 16 in this volume); Finglass and Kelly 2015a; Davies and Finglass 2014: 40–46 (and 47–52 on his meters, which they group into dactylo-anapaestic and dactylo-epitrite). He seems to have had forebears in his hybridity (see West 2015), but we cannot say much about their experiments.

      50 50 See Kelly 2015: 35–37; Finglass and Davies 2014: ad loc.; also Finglass (Chapter 16) in this volume.

      51 51 For this view, see Kelly 2007; for its opposite, see Finglass and Davies 2014: 308–312.

       Nigel Nicholson

      In Pindar’s odes athletic victory is represented as one of the greatest human achievements. “For the remainder of his life, whoever wins a victory voyages in honey-sweet calm, at least as far as contests can confer it,” Pindar declares in Olympian 1.97– 99.1 Of an aging Olympic victor whose son has won a youth contest at Delphi, he goes even further: “Blessed and hymned by the wise is that man who conquering through his hands or the excellence of his feet, takes the greatest of prizes by daring and strength, and while still living sees his young son in turn meet Pythian crowns. He can never scale brazen heaven, but of all the glories that we mortal race touch, he voyages to the furthest limit” (Pyth. 10.22–29). Some men are in awe of the victor (Ol. 9.96, Pyth. 10.58, Nem. 11.12), others are envious (Ol. 6.74–76, Nem. 4.39–41), while women desire him, or wish he was their son (Pyth. 9.97–103). Athletic victory may not cure all ills, but in a confusing world of countless independent city states with a wide variety of constitutions and ideologies, it seems to provide an anchor, a universal value that bound the Greeks together and expressed some deeper commonality beneath all the differences.

      If, then, athletic victory seems like a cultural anchor in Pindar’s odes, that is the odes’ achievement, rather than describing universal values, the odes promoted the values of their patrons by making them seem universal. The value of athletic victory was contested, and each ode had two jobs: to praise the specific victory and to establish the value of the whole institution of athletics.3

      Victory Memorials

      Pindar’s odes belonged to a group of lyric productions now known as epinician or victory odes. The basic ideological maneuver of these poems is to liken the achievement of the victor to the achievements of past heroes by linking a mythical narrative to the present context through proverbs, or gnomes, and verbal and thematic echoes. The poems were typically commissioned by the victor or a family member for performance by a chorus on his return from the games. This combination of choral performance and praise of the individual represented a radical hybridization of earlier practice, relocating the praise of the individual from the private symposium into a communal space, and applying the “choral form to the praise of a single mortal individual.”4 The precise venues for performance depended on the norms of the local community, as well as the patron’s influence, but existing local cults were likely often appropriated as venues for performance, by aristocrats as well as tyrants.5 Such takeovers of existing civic institutions would have embedded the praise of the victor and his family more directly in the fabric of the local community.

      The form flourished in the hands of three great practitioners, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Simonides, but they were not the only producers; papyrus finds have revealed at least epinician-like lyric poems from before Simonides,6 while an ode by an unknown poet from the mid-fifth century is preserved in the manuscript tradition as Pindar’s Olympian 5.7

      There were options other than epinician for commemorating an athletic victory. Statues and other kinds of dedication, set up at the sanctuary where the victory was won, or in a sanctuary or public place in or near the victor’s hometown, could serve the same purpose. A cheaper alternative was provided by specially commissioned vases; one vase records the victory of a Dysniketos in a horse race.11 Tyrants had the option of commemorating victories on their coins: Anaxilas, tyrant of Messene and Rhegium, minted a distinctive and voluminous series of coins featuring a mule cart that commemorated a victory in that event.12 Finally, a particularly impressive victor in a gymnastic (that is, non-equestrian) athletic event could try to pursue a place in an orally transmitted legend that cast him as a hero, whether by imitating the actions of Heracles in deeds of war, feats of strength or even death, or by inserting himself into a pre-existing cult and displacing the cult’s previous occupant. This latter was done by Euthymus of Epizephyrian Locri, three-time winner of the Olympic boxing, in 484, 480, and 472. He was said to have driven away a vampiric spirit from Temesa, in the hinterlands of Locri.13

      The development of epinician in the latter half of the sixth century, and the elaboration or invention of these other vehicles for commemorating athletics—including the use of (increasingly lifelike) statues that purported to represent the athletes as dedications14—should be understood as part of a concerted