CUP 2024 (p/b) 277pp. £24.99 (ISBN 978108831192)
The thesis of E.’s book is that Pindar’s examinations of mortality and immortality in his epinician odes amount to ‘sites for the active negotiation of contemporary religious experience and belief’. She argues throughout a series of case studies that in his treatment of heroes Pindar is in fact conducting an experiment in theology, ‘a pragmatic move…(and a) contribution to contemporary thinking about the orientation of gods and humans in the world’. It’s not clear what this means.
E.’s case studies deal with heroes: Isthmian 4, Nemeans 3 and 4 (Heracles); Nemean 10 (the Dioscuri); Olympian 3 (Heracles, the Dioscuri); Nemean 9, Pythian 8 (Amphiaraus); Pythian 3 (Asclepius); and an afterthought on Nemean 6. We expect there to emerge from Pindar’s different musings about mortality and immortality a coherent account (‘theology’) that reflects what the athletic victors, their families, the audiences at the odes’ performances, and possibly subsequent readers of the texts, thought or felt about heroes, gods and humans and the way they bear on each other, and also how Pindar intends to subtly change those thoughts and feelings.
Problems ensue, primarily arising from the word theology (heavily used in E.’s introduction and prevalent throughout). It simply isn’t possible to construct a catch-all, consistent theory to explain every reference in these passages to mortality and immortality. What starts out as an interestingly provocative claim soon becomes a straitjacket. There was as we know no contemporary canonical authority for belief in gods or heroes which Pindar is imagined to be challenging, beyond a broad acceptance that such powerful figures existed and deserved respect, and whose stories (in the case of heroes) sometimes reflected glory on the laudandus and his family but reminded him not to aspire to more than mortal status. To talk of ‘theologies’ in this context is to commit a category error.
Then again, it would be unwise to assume that everyone in the Greek-speaking world regarded heroization and hero cults in exactly the same light, a point made by Bruno Currie in his excellent Pindar and the Cult of Heroes [OUP 2005]. Pindar’s clients ranged from Aegina to Sicily.
As the book progresses one looks to E. to draw her observations together in a clear statement of Pindar’s supposed theologies and how they differ from each other, but none is forthcoming. One is left having to infer this from her closely argued examples. Perhaps that is what she intends all along, and is the point of the plural in her subtitle, in which case the work turns out to be little more than a series of observations and does not live up to its confident proem.
The shadowy world evoked by Pindar in his victory odes, with its blurred and shifting boundaries between mortal and immortal, is a rich region for scholarly investigation, and E. (an assistant professor at Boston College) is to be commended for leaping into it. But the best commentators, as well as possessing the necessary academic toolkit to disentangle what Pindar may be presumed to be saying, are also aware that he is above all a poet, and certainly not a 5th century philosopher or theologian. Admittedly he can speak gnomically propria persona about divine matters, and hint at a future where a victor may just possibly touch on heroic cult status, but he is essentially a poet who deals in nuance and suggestion. How much more deftly does a commentator like Robert Fowler catch his fleeting imagery in Pindar and the Sublime [Bloomsbury 2022]. After observing how as Nemean 6 closes Pindar ‘nicely fudges’ a false genealogy connecting the Aeacids and Heracles, he concludes ‘the poet moves seamlessly to praise the victor as if it is all one. Both of these heroes, Heracles and Achilles, exemplify the fearful thrill of the boundary…The question of how closely the victor, and we, might match their inspiring example is left hanging in the air’.
Anthony Verity