Bryan Norton, Washington University in St. Louis
M.L. West maintains that the “ideal properties” of fame (kleos) “are volume and extent over space and time” (406). Recently, Henry Spelman has leveraged this insight for his own work on secondary audiences in Pindar. For Spelman, the epinician poet self-consciously seeks to transform an ode’s transient debut performance into a lasting literary artefact. Pindar effects this transformation in no small part by lacing his odes with light. Indeed, as Spelman shows, the “image of fame as celestial light, and especially as sunlight, conveys superlative extent over both spatial and temporal axes” (46). With this maximal extension, light imagery reflects the universal dissemination intended for the odes, which thus script their own literary afterlife.
I share Spelman’s interest in Pindar’s secondary audiences but wish to turn this reading on its head. Pindar’s songs do not only catch flame and emit light; they also descend into darkness. In fact, four of the odes (N.4, O.8, O.14, and P.5) conclude with a sudden movement into Hades, the “invisible” realm par excellence. As Charles Segal signaled long ago, these “Underworld Messages” in Pindar remain largely unexplored (200). In this paper, I will interpret the shortest of these eschatological odes. Composed for Asopichos of Orchomenos, Olympian Fourteen ends with an abrupt apostrophe to Echo, who is summarily sent to the realm of the dead (vv.20-24, my translation):
...μελαντειχέα νῦν δόμον
Φερσεφόνας ἔλθ’, Ἀχοῖ, πατρὶ κλυτὰν φέροισ’ ἀγγελίαν,
Κλεόδαμον ὄφρ’ ἰδοῖσ’, υἱὸν εἴπῃς ὅτι οἱ νέαν
κόλποις παρ’ εὐδόξοις Πίσας
ἐστεφάνωσε κυδίμων ἀέθλων πτεροῖσι χαίταν.
To the black-walled house of
Persephone, now go, Echo, carrying to the (victor’s) father the famous message,
so that when you see Kleodamos, you can say that his son,
beside the glorious glens of Pisa,
has crowned his youthful hair with the wings of renowned contests.
In a recent interpretation, Alex Hardie seeks to reconstruct the ode’s debut performance at the civic shrine of the Charites. Unfortunately, the strict limits of this methodological framework leave little room for Echo’s katabasis. Indeed, Hardie patently rejects the possibility of communication with the dead, alleging that “sound does not easily reach the Underworld” (460). Instead, with Hardie’s performative lens, the “black-walled house of Persephone,” functions as a possible “echo” of the “blackish” marble quarried for the city’s shrine (451).
Pace Hardie, I will argue for a real poetic katabasis in the ode and unpack the (meta)poetic implications of Echo’s Underworld Message. On my reading, the “black-walled house of Persephone” says little about the ode’s debut performance in Orchomenos and much about the poet’s own project in perpetuum. By sending Echo into the dark, Pindar boldly seeks to transcend the light. Audibility in the Underworld both secures and displays the immortalizing power of the poet’s song. This paper will thus advance recent work on lyric perception (both visuality and soundscape), along with Pindaric (re)performance and afterlife (literary and eschatological alike).