Aegina’s Philoxenia: Poets and Trainers in Pindar’s Nemean 5 and Bacchylides 13

This paper examines the depiction of the Athenian trainer Menandros in Pindar’s Nemean 5 and Bacchylides 13, commissioned for Pytheas of Aegina’s pankration victory. I will argue that Pindar and Bacchylides employ convergent communicative strategies when praising Pytheas’ trainer Menandros. Both poets emphasize the trainer’s mobility in service of his trainees, as well as his Athenian origin. These representations embed Menandros’ training in a cycle of elite gift-exchange and ultimately assimilate his profession to that of an itinerant craftsman like the poets themselves. I furthermore suggest that such verbal and semantic overlap generates a composite encomiastic effect in the context of a public victory celebration. Read together, Pindar’s and Bacchylides’ poems imply that the Athenian trainer willingly comes to Aegina to provide his services without monetary compensation.

This frames the entire Aeginetan community as his gracious hosts and alludes to Aegina’s philoxenia (Nemean 5.8 , B.13.95, Kowalzig 2011). I will ultimately advance the claim that poets’ doubled praise of Menandros represents a strategy of inclusion during a time of Athenian-Aeginetan hostilities (Herodotus 5.86). Some have argued that Pindar displays a cold and harsh attitude towards the trainer ( Pfeijffer 1995), and others that Bacchylides’ poem justifies the coach’s presence in an aristocratic milieu that was hostile towards the notion of taught athletic skill, and perhaps hostile towards Athens as well ( Nicholson 2005).

My reading offers a simpler solution. By not only acknowledging the trainer’s presence but also praising him in the context of a public victory celebration, each poet naturalizes his employment on Aegina during a time of political tension with Athens. Pindar, for example, compares Menandros to a craftsman (Νemean 5.49) and envisions Athenian coaches traveling to their trainees throughout the Greek world. Bacchylides also describes Menandros training his pupils on-site, regardless of their geographic location (B13.198). Professional coaches in classical Athens usually owned their own wrestling school and did not give one-on-one instruction, but instead taught groups of young men in regular, ongoing sessions ( Pritchard 2003). Pindar and Bacchylides invert the order in which such a professional would have trained his students and thereby align Menandros more with itinerant craftsmen than with traditional athletic trainers. Both poets also omit references to cash payments and imply that travel and gift-exchange sustain the relationship between Menandros and his trainees.

The poets thus represent Menandros as an itinerant professional, whose work is so valuable that not even hostilities with his city can damage his relationship with Aegina. I would therefore suggest that this indirect praise of Aeginetan philoxenia can be understood as a rhetorical strategy whereby Pindar and Bacchylides ameliorate Athenian-Aeginetan tensions. The poets’ complementary approaches to the topic of Athenian athletic training thus effect high praise of Menandros and the Aeginetan community by emphasizing a web of social connections between trainer, athlete, and polis.