By Kathryn A. Morgan
This groundbreaking booklet makes an attempt an absolutely contextualized analyzing of the poetry written via Pindar for Hieron of Syracuse within the 470s BC. It argues that the victory odes and different occasional songs composed through Pindar for the Sicilian tyrant have been a part of an intensive cultural software that incorporated athletic pageant, coinage, structure, sanctuary commitment, urban starting place, and lots more and plenty extra. within the tumultuous years following the Persian invasion of Greece in 480, elite Greek leaders and their towns struggled to capitalize at the Greek victory and to outline themselves as loose peoples who triumphed over the specter of Persian monarchy. Pindar's victory odes are an immense contribution to Hieron's aim of panhellenic pre-eminence, redescribing modern tyranny as an instantiation of golden-age kingship and consonant with top Greek culture. In a fragile means of cultural legitimation, the poet's compliment deploys athletic victories as a symptoms of extra common preeminence. 3 preliminary chapters set the degree via providing the historical past and tradition of Syracuse below the Deinomenid tyrants, exploring problems with functionality and patronage, and juxtaposing Hieron to rival Greek leaders at the mainland. next chapters research in flip all Pindar's preserved poetry for Hieron and contributors of his courtroom, and contextualizes this poetry through evaluating it to the songs written for Hieron via Pindar's poetic modern, Bacchylides. those odes enhance a in particular "tyrannical" mythology during which a hero from the previous enjoys strange closeness with the gods, merely to carry spoil on him or herself via failing to regulate this closeness competently. Such unfavourable exemplars counterbalance Hieron's success and current the hazards opposed to which he needs to (and does) defend himself by way of regal advantage. The readings that emerge are marked via unheard of integration of literary interpretation with the political/historical context.
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Extra info for Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C.
Example text
37 Hieron may well have hoped to be the recipient of hero cult in Aitna, but such cults were chiefly of local importance, and the stakes for him were higher: nothing less than acceptance as a panhellenic hero. ” There may be some profit in thinking about this from a different angle. I hope this book will show that the occasion of victory was so important that victory in the games became for Hieron a generalizable phenomenon, an achievement into which all other achievements could be rolled and celebrated.
Pindar does, as Weber argues, focus on how power is used, but by no means does he ignore monarchy as a form of government; rather he explores this issue both implicitly and explicitly in the Hieron odes. We shall see moreover that royal odes are characterized by features such as the “superlative vaunt” (the assertion that the victor is supreme in a certain field of endeavor) and that the poems for Hieron share the mythological focus on great sinners referred to above. The supposition that generic elements are an external given that constrains the poet to a certain range of expression does scant justice to the flexibility of epinician and archaic genre.
6 This Gelon, then, is an Might we see here an implicit reply to the Lakedaimonian assertion that “Agamemnon, descendent of Pelops” would roll over in his grave if they did not command? 6. It is possible, though this must remain mere speculation, that Gelon saw himself as the inheritor of the Dorian mantle in Sicily. An anecdote told at Polyaenus Strat. 3 refers to an invitation by Gelon to Dorians to move to Sicily (ἐποίκους μὲν ἐκάλει τοὺς ἐθέλοντας Δωριῶν; Luraghi 1994: 289–290). 5. The Deinomenids and Syracuse | 27 opportunist who justifies himself by one-sided readings of the past, creating present parallels by manipulating the data at his disposal.