Pindar’s Library: Performance Poetry and Material Texts

Pindar’s Library is the first volume to explore how readers during the Hellenistic period encountered Pindar’s poetry in book form, analysing in detail the role played by Pindar’s literary, cultic, and scholarly reception in affecting readers’ engagement with his epinician odes. The volume examines the poet’s literary devices of encomiastic techniques, mythical narratives, and paraenetic discourses against the background of the song culture of the fifth century, considering the poems as both material documents and performance pieces. With a particular focus on the poems that begin and end the Olympian and Pythian books, the volume considers the continuities between reading and attending performances, highlighting elements of readers’ experiences distinctive to Hellenistic culture. It also investigates the issue of quotations of poets in ancient commentaries, and how such citations influenced readers’ understanding of intertextual relationships. Throughout the volume, the relations between Pindar’s epinicians and the contextual factors that influence their reception are seen in dialogic terms: as well as exerting a powerful influence over subsequent literature, the poems are also recontextualized in ways that shift and extend their cultural significance.