On Being Vatic: Pindar, Pragmatism, and Historicism

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the large truth claims made in Pindar's gnomic language have a correspondingly large cultural function since they instantiate the capacity for unprecedented conceptual invention within a culture that lacks any master discourse in which its own self-understanding is embedded. I discuss the famous Nomos basileus fragment and its handling by Callicles in Plato's Gorgias, and by H�lderlin in his Pindar Fragments. I argue that, by using Pindar's claim as a starting point for reflections of their own, these thinkers recognize its contingency, and future orientation, as vatic speech.

Pindar’s Voices: Music, Ethics and Reperformance

“…16 Payne (2006) 162 on the cultural critical paradigm of poetry 'reflect[ing] back to its audience what it already knows and believes'. This approach sees Archaic poetry as involving 'the recirculation of pre-existing paradigms' (Payne (2006) 162), rather than as prompting interpretative reflection, and is grounded in the notion of audiences My second major claim is that the monodic reperformance of epinicians both instantiated and demanded an individuated response to the poem in question, and that this response carried both an ethical and interpretative charge. Before examining these claims in relation to the two poems, however, some general reflections on both the idea of the individual listener and the monodic reperformance scenario are in order.…”

“…17 For the pragmatic grounds of his reading, cf. Payne (2006) 161-63. It should be noted that Payne's model is not inconsistent with Pindar's use of the language of ἁλήθεια and the role of truth claims in his poetry, for which see, for example, Komornicka (1972); Park (2013) 18-20.…”

“…Porter (2016) 357 on the 'sublime' overtones of this rhetoric. 81 On the difficulty or obscurity of poetic language as opening up spaces of intellectual encounter, see Payne (2007) 12-13.…”