Secondary Audiences

Chapter I lays the groundwork by showing how Pindar’s epinicians, despite being occasional poetry, take into account audiences beyond their first performance. Using the texts themselves as evidence, it first shows how Pindar’s poems anticipate and accommodate secondary audiences. Two sections then examine types of knowledge necessary for understanding the poems: first, knowledge of debut performance contexts; secondly, knowledge of external data including public history, individual circumstances, and mythological traditions. The conclusion emerges that knowledge available to debut audiences but unavailable to secondary audiences is largely inessential for understanding and appreciating Pindar’s poetry. Section 3 addresses the question of Pindar’s difficulty while section 4 considers the role of written texts in the reception of his work. The odes’ complexity provides an impetus, not an obstacle, to their later reception. The evidence for a text-based literary culture in Pindar’s day is cumulatively stronger than is sometimes supposed.

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