This work is concerned with Pindar and archaic Greek literary culture. Part One discusses Pindar’s relationship to his audiences. It demonstrates how his victory odes address an audience present at their premiere performance and also a broader secondary audience throughout space and time. I argue that getting the most out of these texts involves simultaneously assuming the perspectives of both. Part Two describes how Pindar uses other lyric to situate his work both within an immanent poetic history and within a contemporary poetic culture. It sets out Pindar’s vision of the literary world, both past and present, and shows how this framework shapes the meaning of his work. Whereas the last several decades of scholarship on early Greek lyric have focused on the immediate contexts of first performance, this work instead focuses on the rhetoric and realities of poetic permanence and provides the first book-length study devoted to this topic. It combines historical and literary perspectives in a unique way in order to offer a new understanding of the nature of early Greek poetic culture and new insights into the texts that it produced.

This paper explores what the most substantial remnant of Sappho’s poetry could have meant to its first audiences. Scholars often approach fr. 44 as a response to the HomericIliad, but for Sappho’s contemporaries theIliadwould not have constituted the sole horizon for intertextual engagement. I suggest that the description of the wedding of Hector and Andromache would have brought to mind the wedding of Paris and Helen, a parallel traditional episode that was well-known in Sappho’s day. Section 1 describes how our knowledge of mythical discourse on archaic Lesbos may guide the interpretation of fr. 44. Section 2 argues for the relevance of the wedding of Paris and Helen and sketches some interpretive implications.

This essay explores the practices through which a thin stratum of society acquired deep experience with written literature in the early Greek world. Combining a pessimistic view about the popularity of schools with an optimistic view about the stability of institutional patterns, I argue that from an early date elite ideology valorised education through the intensive study of certain written texts. Schools thus worked to institutionalise an enduring and important connection between economic capital and cultural capital acquired through reading and performing poetry. It was in the Classical period, if not before, that the interconnected practices of literate education and literary reading acquired their distinctive social character. Fully understanding the complex interface between orality and literacy in the early Greek world entails understanding some highly literate subcultures on their own terms.

This article argues that Pindar refers to cyclic Trojan epics as fixed poems known to his audiences and discusses why this matters for our understanding of his poetry. Section I claims that Isthmian 4 alludes to the Aethiopis as the work of Homer. Section II examines how Nemean 10 closely engages with the Cypria. Section III argues that Nemean 6 and Isthmian 8 signal an intertextual engagement with the Aethiopis and the Cypria. A conclusion assesses how far we can extrapolate from the preceding arguments to generalize about Pindar's relationship to Trojan epic and then suggests one particular way in which recognizing allusions to lost epic can enrich our understanding of his preserved lyric.

Apollo travels from Pytho to Olympus, and the other gods greet his arrival (186–93): ἔνθεν δὲ πρὸϲ Ὄλυμπον ἀπὸ χθονὸϲ ὥϲ τε νόημα εἶϲι Διὸϲ πρὸϲ δῶμα θεῶν μεθ’ ὁμήγυριν ἄλλων⋅ αὐτίκα δ’ ἀθανάτοιϲι μέλει κίθαριϲ καὶ ἀοιδή. Μοῦϲαι μέν θ’ ἅμα πᾶϲαι ἀμειβόμεναι ὀπὶ καλῇ ὑμνεῦϲίν ῥα θεῶν δῶρ’ ἄμβροτα ἠδ’ ἀνθρώπων τλημοϲύναϲ, ὅϲ’ ἔχοντεϲ ὑπ’ ἀθανάτοιϲι θεοῖϲι ζώουϲ’ ἀφραδέεϲ καὶ ἀμήχανοι, οὐδὲ δύνανται εὑρέμεναι θανάτοιό τ’ ἄκοϲ καὶ γήραοϲ ἄλκαρ. From there he goes quick as a thought from the earth to Olympus, to the house of Zeus, in order to join the gathering of the other gods. Immediately the immortals concern themselves with lyre music and song. All the Muses together, responding with their beautiful voice, hymn the divine gifts of the gods and the endurance of men, all that they have from the immortal gods and yet live ignorant and helpless, unable to find a remedy for death and a defence against old age.