Caitlin Miller (University of Chicago)
Since the important advance of New Historicist approaches to Pindaric studies (Kurke 1991, ch.5; Kurke 1996), little sustained attention has been paid to Pindar’s depictions of women, marriage, and biological reproduction beyond a widespread acknowledgement of the largely negative light in which female exemplars are painted in the odes (e.g. Kyriakou 1994). On the other hand, the central importance of kinship and genealogy to establishing legitimacy, status, and aetiology in the epinician project suggest that an ideology of gender roles and norms cannot but be at issue in the odes. When there is trouble with kinship in epinician, this trouble is almost invariably expressed through the lens of gender norms and their contravention: transgressions of women’s sexual behavior, the contingency of fertility and childbearing, and the potential fragility of inheritance due to a lack of legitimate children (e.g., P. 4.24-7, O. 9.60-63, O. 10.86-90).
This talk focuses on depictions of labor and childbirth in Pindar’s odes, framed around a central reading of Asklepios’ birth and his mother Koronis’ death in Pythian 3 and the long description of Euadne’s labor and birth in Olympian 6. I show how these narratives are fundamental to constructing a system of status-making that takes the recognition of legitimate kinship as essential and which seeks to create institutions—like epinician itself—for proving, asserting, and arguing for the importance of that legitimacy. While these narratives reveal an ideological attempt to assert this kind of institutionalization of normative kinship roles, they also point to significant anxieties around the potential fragility of kinship relations and the difficulty of asserting legitimate familial and genealogical relationships. Recent approaches to socioeconomic organization in the Archaic and early Classical polis have emphasized the instability of “aristocratic” power in this period (van Wees and Fisher 2015). In this same vein, Pindar’s detailed attention to the process of conception, labor, childbirth, and their potential transgressions shows how the scrutiny of the process of biological reproduction is both essential to epinician’s elite project and fraught with complication and insecurity.
By using the framework of social reproduction theory, which emphasizes the importance of biological reproduction in the perpetuation of particular social systems and values, I show how Pindar’s depictions of women are not only negative foils for the positive exemplarity of his male victors but integral to the project of establishing personal and familial legitimacy in the face of elite instability in the early fifth century. Epinician constantly seeks to construct kinship relations as natural through the ground of the female body, a process fundamentally related to its extensive analogization of male victors’ physical achievement to their status, wealth, and ethical value. This attention to the gendered body, then, not only speaks to the ideological importance of kinship and status competition in the odes, but to the much-debated question of epinician function in Pindar’s corpus as a whole.