Pindar

GREEK 131 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course focuses on songs of Pindar that were composed to celebrate the victories of athletes who competed in athletic events that took place at the Olympics in Olympia and at other such seasonally recurring festivals. Such songs, known to classicists as "epinician poems" or "victory odes," were usually performed in the victorious athlete’s native city. The poet Pindar, whose career coincides with the first half of the fifth century BCE, was a “star” composer of such victory odes, and it was a matter of stratospheric prestige for the family of a victorious athlete to succeed in commissioning Pindar to compose for their native son such a celebratory song. The odes to be read in the original Greek for this course will include selections that all students will be reading, balanced with further selections chosen by each student. The amount of reading will be variable, adjusted to each student’s degree of preparation. For example, those who have already studied Homeric poetry will be able to read more, but those students without such background can catch up rapidly, with the professor’s one-on-one help. To be studied in the course is not only the poetic language of Pindar but also the historical background of athletic festivals and of elitist as well as non-elitist ideologies linking the heroic past as a model for athletes—including women athletes.

A book that will be consulted in analyzing the historical background of female as well as male athleticism is the professor’s recent book Ancient Greek Heroes, Athletes, Poetry (2024). Pindar’s poetry, especially with reference to the hero Herakles, figures most prominently in that book. Other heroes highlighted in Pindar’s poetry include the tragic figure of Ajax, as analyzed in another book written by the professor: Imagining the hero Ajax in poetry by Pindar and by Pindar's Homer (2024).