Pindar, History, and Historicism*

Pindar’s odes should be promising terrain for the (not so) recent turn in literary studies from formalism to historicism. First, epinician poetry is clearly embedded in society, performed within a specific community on a specific and often dateable occasion,1 naming real individuals and addressing their concerns and those of their community. Second, because of this tight relation to contemporary interests, epinician is tightly connected to other cultural products and practices, such as dedications, vases, oral tradition, and religious rituals, and with these can be seen to structure a larger symbolic system of values and beliefs. Third—and in this respect epinician differs markedly from tragedy—it brings us into a lot of peripheral communities that are either little known or are illuminated only by the reflected light of Athens and Athenian interests, and thus challenges the dominant Athenian narratives that often determine our critical gaze. Finally, because epinician has always lacked the centrality of tragedy, in terms of both Greek imperial geography and modern critical practice, Pindar’s odes can more easily be seen to be in competition with other products, to be attempts to fix the truth, to be interventions in a cultural system, and not descriptions of it. The cultural systems they are part of thus stand revealed not as stable or singular systems, but sites of continual and varied contest over meaning and value.2 None of the books under review here claims to be New Historicist— indeed some or all might positively disclaim the title—but New Historicism offers a convenient framework with which to compare and examine them, since a central concern in all three books is the relationship between Pindar’s odes and their historical context. In many respects, the approaches taken by