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)

The ego or speaking subject of Pindar's Sixth Paian is anomalous, as has been acknowledged by many scholars. In a genre whose ego is predominantly choral, the speaking subject at the beginning of Paian 6 differentiates himself from the chorus and confidently analogizes his poetic authority to the prophetic power of Delphi by his self-description as αοίδιμον Πιερίδων προfάταν. I would like to correlate Pindar's exceptional ego in this poem with what has recently emerged as the poem's exceptional performance context. (...) Following Ian Rutherford's 1997 discovery of a second marginal title for the third triad , we might postulate performance by two choruses: the first two triads sung by a Delphian chorus stationary at the altar, the last triad sung by an Aiginetan chorus as they process to the altar. The need to reconcile within the poem and the space of performance two choruses, two communities, and two local mythic traditions generates the strikingly prominent speaking subject of Paian 6 as a mediating figure. (shrink)

Roman writing of the late Republic and early Empire, especially historiography, is filled with exempla, stories of the past meant to serve as models for contemporary and future behavior. This period also witnessed the rise of an encyclopedic mode of composition among Latin authors, which purported to collect and organize the totality of knowledge in a given field. The following essay proposes that exemplarity and encyclopedism were not just literary devices, but deep organizational principles throughout Roman culture. It seeks to (...) show how they were operative in the visual arts in the first century BCE, focusing especially on a frieze depicting the baking process on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces in Rome. By approaching a monument like the frieze of Eurysaces through such principles we may better articulate both visual and thematic relationships across a variety of genres within the broader Roman image world. (shrink)