By convention epinician poetry claims to be both obligatory and truthful, yet in the intersection of obligation and truth lies a seeming paradox: the poet presents his poetry as commissioned by a patron but also claims to be unbiased enough to convey the truth. In Slater's interpretation Pindar reconciles this paradox by casting his relationship to the patron as one of guest-friendship: when he declares himself a guest-friend of the victor, he agrees to the obligation ‘a) not to be envious (...) of hisxenosand b) to speak well of him. The argumentation is:Xeniaexcludes envy, I am axenos, therefore I am not envious and consequently praise honestly’. Slater observes that envy may foster bias against the patron, but the problem of pro-patron bias remains: does the poet's friendship with and obligation to his patron produce praise at the expense of truth? (shrink)

This paper considers Pindar's diverse appropriations of elements of the sacred topography of Aegina for different purposes in epinikia composed for Aeginetan victors. It focuses on poems likely performed in the vicinity of the Aiakeion for their different mobilizations of a monument that we know from Pausanias stood beside the Aiakeion—the tomb of Phokos, an earth mound topped with the “rough stone” that killed him. The more speculative final part of the paper suggests that it may also be possible to (...) track a coherent ideology attached to the island's sacred topography across several Aeginetan odes, thereby detecting a broader structural unity that accompanies and frames the different individual appropriations of different poems. This part starts from Pausanias’ mythic narrative of the exemplary justice of Aiakos banishing his own son Telamon as the aetiology for a distinctive Aeginetan justice system inscribed in a whole set of man-made monuments that ring the island with concentric circles of rough stones. (shrink)

In positioning his laudandus Hagesias as the co-founder of Syracuse, Pindar considers the larger ideological implications of including a seer in a colonial foundation. The poet begins Olympian 6 by praising Hagesias as an athletic victor, seer, and sunoikistêr and therefore as a figure of enormous ritual power. This portrayal, however, introduces an element of competition into Hagesias' relationship with his patron Hieron, the founder of Aitna. In response, the ode's subsequent mythic portions circumscribe Hagesias' status so as to mitigate (...) any challenge the seer might present to Hieron's own political authority. An intertextual reading of Olympian 6's myth with the myth of Pelops in Olympian 1 highlights Pindar's careful negotiation of Hagesias' position in this colonial context. Despite the resulting need to affirm Hagesias' subordination to Hieron, Pindar joins together the seemingly incompatible roles of seer and co-founder because, as an intertextual reading of Nemean 1 helps to illustrate, Hagesias embodies and symbolically enacts in the ode Hieron's synoikism of Aitna. (shrink)