Event and Artefact

This chapter examines the interplay between first performance and subsequent reception in fifth-century lyric and especially in Pindar’s epinicians. It describes how poems trace their own travels from unrepeatable event to perpetuated artefact and draws conclusions about the shape of the literary culture behind Pindar’s odes. Six sections discuss six passages that map their journey from performance into permanence. A concluding section then uses these passages as case studies and primary evidence in order to draw overarching conclusions about the relationship between the rhetoric of performance and the realities of literary practices. By studying Pindar’s depictions of the life of his work we can better see how his poems found a place in a poetic culture stretching through time and space. Pindar brings the view sub specie aeternitatis into the moment of performance and also transmits the view from a certain hic et nunc into perpetuity.

Aesthetics · Art · Event (particle physics) · Linguistics · Literature · Order (exchange) · Perpetuity · Poetry · Rhetoric · Section (typography) · Space (punctuation) · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Classical Antiquity Studies · Computer Science · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods · Philosophy