The Epinician Present

Chapter VII discusses epinician as a living social practice in Pindar’s day. By assembling clues from across his corpus one can see further into a cultural and literary context which shapes the meaning of many passages and indeed the significance of Pindar’s authorial project as a whole. The texts themselves provide our best evidence for the contours of that context. This chapter analyses different sorts of references and draws conclusions from each type. Five sections treat, in order, the epinician genre, Pindar’s career, patrons’ history of patronage, other eulogists, and revels at the site of the games. Section 6 offers an interpretation of Nemean 6, an ode that situates itself both within traditional social practices and a poetic canon. A conclusion then synthesizes preceding arguments and offers a reconstruction of the literary culture surrounding fifth-century epinician.

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