The Creative Impact of the Occasion: Pindar'S Songs for the Emmenids and Horace'S Odes1.12 and 4.2
The Creative Impact of the Occasion: Pindar'S Songs for the Emmenids and Horace'S Odes1.12 and 4.2
Much Greek lyric was composed for particular performance occasions that called for appropriate narrative. This chapter considers Pindar's songs for the Emmenids of Acragas, in which Pindar not only adapts his narrative to each performance event but reworks narrative material from his earlier compositions for the same family. In the Sixth Pythian, Pindar's narrative was inspired by the East Frieze of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi; in the Second Olympian, he evokes that poem in a way that indicates that his placement of Achilles and Peleus in the Isles of the Blessed implies immortality not only for Theron, but Xenocrates, the subject of P.6, and his son Thrasybulus. Throughout Pindar's poems for the Emmenids, narrative detail is chosen or invented to mark the present occasion and to link different events. Narratives in Horace's Pindarizing Odes 1.12 and 4.2, in contrast, do not reflect unique occasions.
Keywords: Pindar, lyric, Theron, Xenocrates, Invention of detail, Performance occasion
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