Pindar and the Cult of Heroes combines a study of Greek culture and religion (hero cult) with a literary-critical study of Pindar's epinician poetry. It looks at hero cult generally, but focuses especially on heroization in the 5th century BC. There are individual chapters on the heroization of war dead, of athletes, and on the religious treatment of the living in the 5th century. Hero cult, Bruno Currie argues, could be anticipated, in different ways, in a person's lifetime. Epinician poetry too should be interpreted in the light of this cultural context; fundamentally, this genre explores the patron's religious status. The book features extensive studies of Pindar's Pythians 2, 3, 5, Isthmian 7, and Nemean 7.

This study questions the traditional view of sacrifices in hero-cults during the Archaic to the early Hellenistic periods. The analysis of the epigraphical and literary evidence for sacrifices to heroes in these periods shows, contrary to the traditional notion, that the main ritual in hero-cults was a thysia at which the worshippers consumed the meat from the animal victim. A particular handling of the animal’s blood or a holocaust, rituals previously taken to be typical for heroes, can rarely be documented and must be considered as marginal features in hero-cults. The terms eschara, escharon, bothros, enagizein, enagisma, enagismos and enagisterion, believed to be characteristic for hero-cults, are seldom used in hero-contexts before the Roman period and occur mainly in the Byzantine lexicographers and in the scholia. Since the main kind of sacrifice in hero-cults was a thysia, a ritual intimately connected with the social structure of society, the heroes must have fulfilled the same role as the gods within the Greek religious system. The fact that the heroes were dead seems to have been of little significance for the sacrificial rituals and it is questionable whether the rituals of hero-cults are to be considered as originating in the cult of the dead.

What does it mean to be a hero? The ancient Greeks who gave us Achilles and Odysseus had a very different understanding of the term than we do today. Based on the legendary Harvard course that Gregory Nagy has taught for well over thirty years, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours explores the roots of Western civilization and offers a masterclass in classical Greek literature. We meet the epic heroes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but Nagy also considers the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the songs of Sappho and Pindar, and the dialogues of Plato. Herodotus once said that to read Homer was to be a civilized person. To discover Nagy’s Homer is to be twice civilized. “Fascinating, often ingenious... A valuable synthesis of research finessed over thirty years.” —Times Literary Supplement “Nagy exuberantly reminds his readers that heroes—mortal strivers against fate, against monsters, and...against death itself—form the heart of Greek literature... [He brings] in every variation on the Greek hero, from the wily Theseus to the brawny Hercules to the ‘monolithic’ Achilles to the valiantly conflicted Oedipus.” —Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly

Myth, Locality, and Identity argues that Pindar engages in a striking, innovative style of mythmaking that represents and shapes Sicilian identities in his epinician odes for Sicilian victors in the fifth century BCE. While Sicily has been thought to be lacking in local traditions for Pindar to celebrate, Lewis argues that the Sicilian odes offer examples of the formation of local traditions: the monster Typho whom Zeus defeated to become king of the gods, for example, now lives beneath Mt. Aitna; Persephone receives the island of Sicily as a gift from Zeus; and the Peloponnesian river Alpheos travels to Syracuse in pursuit of the local spring nymph Arethusa. By weaving regional and Panhellenic myth into the local landscape, as the book shows, Pindar infuses physical places with meaning and thereby contextualizes people, cities, and their rulers within a wider Greek framework. During this time period, Greek Sicily experienced a unique set of political circumstances: the inhabitants were continuously being displaced, cities were founded and resettled, and political leaders rose and fell from power in rapid succession. This book offers the first sustained analysis of myth in Pindar's odes for Sicilian victors across the island that accounts for their shared context. The nodes of myth and place that Pindar fuses in this poetry reinforce and develop a sense of place and community for citizens locally; at the same time, they raise the profile of physical sites and the cities attached to them for larger audiences across the Greek world. In addition to providing new readings of Pindaric odes and offering a model for the formation of Sicilian identities in the first half of the fifth century, the book contributes new insights into current debates on the relationship between myth and place in classical literature.