Pindar

In this paper, I examine how the abrupt ending of the myth in Pindar’s break-off formulas, or Abbruchsformeln, is meant to affect the audiences’ overall reception of the poem, and therefore shows us what variants were familiar to them. I propose that Pindar exerts his power over the subject of the poem through a manipulation of available variants by breaking off the myth at the crossroads of possibility and preventing a negative future. Therefore the audience’s recognition of rejected negative variants is as significant as of variants selected for this exertion of power.

The purpose of this paper is to briefly reexamine the relationship between nature (φυά), art (τέχνα), and learning (μανθάνειν) in Pindar, and to argue that it has more in common with the Homeric than with the sophistic conception. The three notions are fundamental for an account of Pindaric poetics (and politics), and the basic relationship between them may seem obvious: nature is presumably opposed to art, which one must learn. Pindar famously derided learners (μαθόντες) in favor of φυά (O. 2.86); he and his audience must have likewise scorned τέχνα.

This paper argues for a metapoetic reading of the mythological narrative of Ixion in Pindar’s Pythian 2.  While previous scholarship (Carey 1981, Most 1985, Morgan 2015) has largely viewed this passage as a negative exemplum warning Hieron of Syracuse against the excesses of tyrannical power and stressing his moral superiority by contrast, I contend that Pindar presents Ixion as a poet of sorts, whose reproductive transgressions mirror the discursive transgressions characteristic of the genre. 

In this paper I use a new historicist lens—following Nicholson (2007)—to argue that Pindar is using his account of Tantalus in Olympian 1.54-64 as an implicit comparison with and warning to Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, whose victory in the keles in 476 BCE this ode celebrates. Although Kirkwood (1982) is hesitant to read the historical Hieron into the ode, I follow Clay (2011) and Morgan (2015), who make a strong case that we should. While Morgan associates Hieron with Pelops, however, I argue instead for a connection with Tantalus.