Introduction

Abstract

This is the second of two volumes on the victory ode to emerge from the international conference held at DCL in July, 2006. The first volume, Reading the Victory Ode, addressed the epinician in its classical and archaic setting. This one looks at some of the ways in which epinician poetry has been read, used, and reused in a range of cultural contexts from the fifth century BC to the nineteenth century. Each essay in the book, as well as covering its own topic, proposes its own definition of what it means to 'do Reception'. For Antiquity, the focus ranges from a study of the victory ode as a model for the Athenian tragic chorus, to the complex intertextual strategies of Hellenistic poetry, to the material (paleographical and papyrological) conditions in which the texts were read under the Roman Empire. Other chapters discuss how epinician, and especially Pindar, served (in various contexts) as a paradigm and model for the Renaissance and modem lyric genre of the ode. The resulting book is necessarily lacunose. Although a complete history of the reception of the victory ode would be worth reading, and therefore writing, this is not that book. We have opted for a series of moments rather than a continuous narrative. In the process we hope to illustrate both the richness and the longevity of epinician's legacy. The central focus in the volume is on the literary reception and the ongoing use of the odes in the evolving culture and poetic heritage of the ancient world and the mediaeval and modem West. I Pindar himself comments at O.9.init. on the generic popular song used in informal celebrations; for this song, and komastic motifs more generally, see most recently Rawles 2011 and Ag6cs 2011. 2 RECEIVING THE KOMOSsurviving formal victory odes that epinician celebration also had a religious element: the athlete and his community gave thanks both to the patron deity of the Games (Zeus in Olympia and Nemea; Poseidon at the Isthmos; and Apollo at Delphi), and to their own epichoric gods and heroes. The song is often presented as prayer or ex voto: an assertion of the lasting, reciprocal favour (charis) between the deity and his worshippers -a feature, it seems, of the archaic popular forms of epinician as well. 2 Commissioned epinician, finally, provided a vehicle for individuals, families, and whole cities (poleis) or countries (ethne) to assert themselves through poetry on the Panhellenic stage. In this respect, the rise of epinician as a genre of commissioned art-song was inseparable from the emergence of the festivals themselves in the early decades of the sixth century BC, when three new athletic competitions (the Pythian games at Delphi and the Nemean and Isthmian games in the Peloponnese) were added to the existing Olympics to form the periodos or 'circuit' of great Panhellenic 'crown' festivals, distinct from the less prestigious local games (the Pythia at Sicyon, for example, the Panathenaic Games at Athens, or the Iolaia at Thebes). In the archaic and classical periods, all Greek athletics and most choral singin...