Studies in the Reception of Pindar in Ptolemaic Poetry by Alexandros Kampakoglou

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 323 control. The authenticity of the poems has been questioned, owing to their lack of specificity and their broad application to an Athens that over centuries debated the success of its democracy.1 But in a study of poets’ construction of social identity we can work with the poems as Solon’s. In his fr. 4 W Romney sees him using some of the same rhetorical techniques she identified in Tyrtaeus and Alcaeus—adopting an authoritative stance and creating an out-group. In this case the out-group is composed of the citizens of Athens themselves, ruining the city as they contend for wealth and power: who is the “we”-group here? The political benefit of grooming a mere sympotic audience to agree with him does not feel like a winning political strategy. One cannot help but envision Solon like Cicero at the rostra, gesturing as he harangues a crowd. More appropriate to the smaller group is fr. 33, where the poet pulls off a rhetorical tour de force. He creates a “Solon” straw-man, a laughing-stock, an ill-advised bloke who cannot take advantage of being a tyrant. The shock value alone of setting himself up as this character might tempt the audience (whoever they were) to attend to the more serious content of his songs. Romney’s study of these selected poems through the lens of rhetorical features is a good one. The claim that the listeners in all cases heard the first performance of the songs reclining on couches and drinking wine is more tenuous. With Tyrtaeus at least some of them could have been composed for performance on campaigns rather than for a symposium or the syssitia. More suitable are Alcaeus’ diatribes against Pittacus and earlier tyrants designed to muster support among his hetaireia. But the construction of a persona, whether through Alcaeus’ lonely exile or Solon’s straight-up or inverted insertion of himself into the poems, may have been the most powerful rhetorical tool of all, adding dramatic realism to the message. Despite some repetitive passages and the occasional lack of clarity, this book opens our eyes to an important dynamic in these poems that is easy to overlook. Western University Bonnie MacLachlan Studies in the Reception of Pindar in Ptolemaic Poetry. By Alexandros Kampakoglou. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter (Trends in Classics Supplement 76). 2019. Pp. xv, 454. This monograph presents an analysis of the reception of Pindar in four Hellenistic poets active at the court of the Ptolemies: Callimachus, Apollonius, Theocritus, and Posidippus. As the author explains, reception here indicates “the process whereby these erudite poets read and understand Pindaric poetry, imbue their works with allusions to Pindar’s oeuvre, and expect their readers to pick up these allusions in order to appreciate their own poetic work” (1). Kampakoglou makes clear that he wishes to tread a middle ground between the fallacies of authorial intentionalism and arbitrary interpretation. This means the book focuses mainly on the generic, thematic, and mythological concerns that characterize Pindaric poetry, rather than only identifying very specific verbal allusions whose interpretation heavily depends on the assumption of authorial intention. A broadly similar approach to the reception of archaic lyric poetry in Hellenistic poetry 1 One example, cited by Romney, is E. Stehle, “Solon’s Self-Reflexive Political Persona and Its Audience,” in J. H. Blok and A. P. M. H. Lardinois (eds.), Solon of Athens: New Historical and Philological Approaches (Leiden 2006) 79–113. 324 PHOENIX was successfully pioneered in Benjamin Acosta-Hughes’s Arion’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric into Hellenistic Poetry (Princeton 2010). The study is subdivided into a theoretical introduction, three main parts, respectively entitled “Epinician Poetry and Discourse,” “Encomia and Hymns,” and “Myth and Poetry,” and a brief afterword. The first part focuses on Callimachus, Posidippus, and Apollonius and their respective ways of dealing with the legacy of Pindar’s epinician poetics. Callimachus’ epinician elegies (the Victoria Berenices and the Victoria Sosibii ) provide the natural starting point, with discussions of important epinician themes such as the limits of the victor’s fame, the value of victory, charis, and divine support. Kampakoglou also offers an insightful analysis of the Callimachean poetic voice

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