Pindar and the Emergence of Literature places Pindar in the context of the evolution of Archaic Greek poetics. While presenting an in-depth introduction to diverse aspects of Pindar's art (authorial metapoetics, imagery, genre hybridization, religion, social context, and dialect), it seeks to establish a middle ground between cultural contextualism and literary history, paying attention both to poetry's historical milieu and its uncanny capacity to endure in time. With that methodological objective, the book marshals a new version of historical poetics, drawing both on theorists usually associated with this approach, such as Alexander Veselovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg, and on T. S. Eliot, Hans Blumenberg, Fredric Jameson, and Stephen Greenblatt. The ultimate literary-historical problem posed by Pindar's poetics, which this book sets out to solve, is the transformation of pre-literary structures rooted in folk communal art into elements that still inform our notion of literature.

For much of Western history, Pindar's work was recognized as the pinnacle of lyric poetry. This book presents an introduction to different aspects of Pindar's art, while demonstrating its importance for the coming into being of literature as it has been conceived of in the West.

In discussing both poets and scholars from a broad historical span, with emphasis on the German legacy of genius, Hamilton investigates how Pindar's obscurity has been perceived and confronted, extorted and exploited. This study addresses a variety of pressing issues, including the possibility or impossibility of a continuous literary tradition.

This stunning book offers a faithful translation of the odes of Pindar, a Greek poet of the fifth century BC. Known for their intricate and elaborate style, Pindar's odes celebrate victories in athletic contests and offer insight into ancient Greek culture and society. This book is a must-have for anyone interested in classical literature and history. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Study of classical Greek poet and the ode form in Western tradition. Assumes no knowledge of specialist literature and includes translations.

Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in the influence of archaic lyric poetry on Hellenistic poets. However, no study has yet examined the reception of Pindar, the most prominent of the lyric poets, in the poetry of this period. This monograph is the first book to offer a systematic examination of the evidence for the reception of Pindar in the works of Callimachus of Cyrene, Theocritus of Syracuse, Apollonius of Rhodes and Posidippus of Pella. Through a series of case studies, it argues that Pindaric poetry exercised a considerable influence on a variety of Hellenistic genres: epinician elegies and epigrams, hymns, encomia, and epic poetry. For the poets active at the courts of the first three Ptolemies, Pindar's poetry represented praise discourse in its most successful configuration. Imitating aspects of it, they lent their support to the ideological apparatus of Greco-Egyptian kingship, shaped the literary profile of Pindar for future generations of readers, and defined their own role and place in Greek literary history. The discussion offered in this book suggests new insights into aspects of literary tradition, Ptolemaic patronage, and Hellenistic poetics, placing Pindar's work at the very heart of an intricate nexus of political and poetic correspondences.