Alice Gaber (The Ohio State University)
Pindar’s Paian B2 (Rutherford = 8 Snell-Maehler) offers a rich layering of real and mythic choruses, including the enigmatic Keledones, a chorus comprised of manufactured, inanimate objects that nonetheless engage in choral song-dance. This paper examines this sculptural chorus that adorns the mythic third temple of Apollo at Delphi, comparing these dancing, singing statues to other mythic choral paradigms, productively complicating and nuancing our understanding of ancient chorality. The artificial – and I add artifactual – quality of the Keledones is the focus of Power’s influential article on the ode, in which he compares the Keledones to known architectural features of Greek temples such as winged acroteria and caryatids, which have “incipient chorality” in their collective, ritual iconography and mythic symbolism. More recently, Weiss argues that the presumed real-world choral performance, situated on the site of the Alcmeonid temple at Delphi, reinforces the audience’s visualization of the previous four (mythic) temples: the dancers become the temple and the temple is made of dance-song.
This paper builds on this recent trend in scholarship to understand the Keledones as a chorus, much like other mythic choral paradigms, by focusing on choral femininity. Both the Deliades (Homeric Hymn to Apollo) and the Sirens (Homer’s Odyssey) are important models for the explicitly feminine chorality of the Keledones on the levels of choral dance-song (linking the kinetic and verbal), empathetic spectatorship, and a liminal status between human and divine. Further, the female voice of these paradigmatic choruses appropriates other choral genres and ventriloquizes otherwise male speech, as the Keledones do in this paian, a traditionally male-associated song. Women’s song, in fact, disproportionately dominates the imaginary of the choral. Like other models of female chorality, such as the negative paradigms in Alcman’s first partheneion, the Keledones are models of female voice, but unmediated ones, not yet perfectly realized as chorus.
Yet, these parallels ignore a further crucial element of the Keledones’ chorality: their materiality. The fragment includes two words referring to the temple and its sculptures as works of plastic art (111: ἔργων; 118: δαίδαλμα) and one that bridges the gap between musical and visual media (104: ῥυθμός). As the three elaborately wrought choruses that decorate Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad, the Keledones are manufactured objects; further, they are wrought into the medium of text via poetic ekphrasis. This is emphasized by the astonishment they elicit. Astonishment is an effect of statuary as well as choral speech (Steiner), marked in Pindar’s paian by the participle ἀγασθέντες (112). For dancing choruses (and more static works of visual art), the body itself, its physical properties of sight and sound and motion, is transformed into an object of enraptured gaze in a way that mimics the objectification of the female body more generally.