What theological relevance did Pindar’s poetry have for audiences steeped in the religious and cultic contexts of 5th-century BCE Greece? This is the question that Eisenfeld poses in this fine-grained examination of Pindaric epinikia. By foregrounding how the victory odes embed themselves in religious experiences, Eisenfeld’s work positions itself among recent scholarship on the social, political, and cultural contexts of Pindar’s poetry. The book’s emphasis on ‘lived religion’ also produces compelling close readings of some of the most difficult surviving Pindaric epinikia. In seven chapters, Eisenfeld analyzes Pindar’s myths about Herakles, the Dioskouroi, Amphiaraos, and Asklepios, highlighting instances in which these heroes blur the boundaries between mortal and immortal. She shows that these narratives perform theological interventions for their audiences: consistent invocations of the heroes’ liminal status provide Pindar’s audiences access to theological discourse on the nature of mortality. Because the book insists on an inseparability of mythical and cultic experience, Eisenfeld eschews providing a single “one-size-fits-all” interpretation of epinikian myths. The book also delivers its most convincing arguments when it uses material evidence to back up philological analysis.
The book’s first chapter covers the history of scholarship on gods and heroes in Pindar. Eisenfeld extends Jörg Rüpke’s approach to ‘lived religion’ to the religious experiences of poet, patron, and celebratory community. These varied experiences provide the context for her interpretation of the poems. [1] Eisenfeld also argues that Pindar’s poetry expresses a worldview that does not draw a distinction between heroes in cultic worship and heroes in mythic narratives. This novel approach connects the chapters from start to finish and thus offers an explicit response to Bruno Currie’s 2005 monograph Pindar and the Cult of Heroes. Importantly, a brief excursus on Pelops in Olympian 1 shows us what Eisenfeld will not do. The book will not focus on heroes whose mortality and cultic worship make them accessible paradigms for Pindar’s patrons but instead on a set of characters whose own status on the mortal-divine axis is “up for grabs”.[2]
Chapter 2 provides an engaging model for this approach: the allusions to Herakles’ apotheosis and the Pillars of Herakles in Isthmian 3/4 and Nemeans 3 & 4. Eisenfeld cogently argues that the pillars mark the farthest end of the human experiences shared by Herakles, the victor, and the victor’s community. However, because Pindar also ties the pillars to Herakles’ subsequent immortalization, these poems ultimately reinforce a division between the mortal and divine realms. For example, Eisenfeld emphasizes that Herakles’ establishment of the Pillars and his wrestling match against Antaios in Isthmian 3/4 are paradigms for the Theban victor Melissos. But crucially, subsequent references to Herakles’ immortality in the same poem resist such a paradigmatic function and instead highlight Herakles as the recipient of cultic worship in Thebes. Drawing on the work of Eveline Krummen, Eisenfeld argues that Pindar’s language here refracts the performance context of the poem in Thebes.[3] Pindar’s references to cultic activity bind the figures of cult (i.e., Herakles’ sons) together with the victor’s family and his community. Yet Herakles, by virtue of his apotheosis, is no longer a part of this community. Eisenfeld convincingly shows that these two disparate modes of thinking about immortality are central to the poem. The latter half of the chapter focuses on Aegina and reads the mortal, pillar-erecting Herakles as a model for the Aeginetan Aiakids. In her reading of Nemean 3, for example, Eisenfeld points to compelling parallels between the poem’s youthful, deer-hunting Achilles and material-cultural depictions of Herakles’ capture of the Cerynean hind. The reading of Nemean 4 focuses on a catalogue of Aiakos’ descendants and shows that Herakles here similarly functions as a conceptual model for the entirety of Aiakos’ family.
Chapters 3 and 4 discuss how the Dioskouroi effect such boundary blurring in Argive (Nemean 10) and Akragantine (Olympian 3) contexts. Chapter 3 argues that the poem’s etiology for Castor and Pollux’s shared immortality engages with contemporary cultic and literary traditions on this subject. On Eisenfeld’s reading, Nemean 10 offers a novel etiology for this state of affairs. At the moment of Castor’s death, a point of crisis for the brothers, Pollux rejects his own immortality in a prayer to Zeus, thereby making the twins neither mortal nor immortal. Pollux’s choice of mortality over immortality models for the victor and the victor’s Argive community a proper course of action. Here Eisenfeld effectively argues that the poem valorizes the human condition.
Meanwhile, Chapter 4 argues that Pindar’s Olympian 3, for Theron of Akragas, mobilizes the Dioskouroi and Herakles to connect the human and divine worlds. The poem’s references to the Dioskouroi invoke theoxenia as a performance context that blurs the boundaries between the mortal and divine worlds. Pindar’s language explicitly characterizes the Dioskouroi as theoxenic guests at Theron’s victory celebration in Akragas. Eisenfeld persuasively argues that the poem’s central myth creates a parallel between Herakles and Theron. Herakles acquires the olive from the Hyperboreans in order to found a sanctuary to Zeus at Olympia. Citing recent work by Virginia Lewis and Maria Pavlou, Eisenfeld shows that by building a temple to Olympian Zeus in the same year that he won the victory (476 BCE), Theron imitates Herakles’ Peloponnesian task in Akragas. [4] Theron thereby proves himself to be an exceptionally privileged human theoxenic host – Pindar assimilates him to Herakles as a mortal with extraordinary (but temporary) access to the divine.
Chapters 5 and 6 further Eisenfeld’s overarching argument by surveying literary and material evidence from the cults of Amphiaraos at Oropos and Asklepios at Epidauros. Chapter 5 makes the best case in the book for reading Pindar’s heroes as fundamentally “dislocated” figures. Eisenfeld’s reading of Nemean 9 shows that, while alive, the seer Amphiaraos already occupies a liminal position between the mortal and divine realms, which is reinforced further when he is engulfed by the earth. This dislocation restricts Amphiaraos’ from ordinary verbal communication, but, as Eisenfeld’s reading of Pythian 8 shows, it also allows him to continuously praise his son Alkmaion, thereby inverting typical epinician conventions. As a father praising his son’s martial exploits, Amphiaraos is an inverse paradigm for the commissioner (the father) of Pythian 8’s subject (a young Aeginetan wrestler). Amphiaraos’ role as a father, rather than a victor’s xenos, renders him too close to Alkmaion, the object of his praise. At the same time, Amphiaraos, as a subterranean seer, is also too remote from Alkmaion to fit conventional epinician models. On Eisenfeld’s reading, Pindar’s own poetic voice ultimately reintegrates Amphiaraos into more familiar epinician models of reciprocity. This assimilates Amphiaraos to the victor’s father, whom Pindar represents as a paradigmatic patron for commissioning Pythian 8, thereby preserving the achievements of his son.
Chapter 6 rounds out the collection with an excellent reading of Pindar’s Pythian 3. Eisenfeld makes a compelling argument that Pindar uses the Panhellenic aspirations of the Asklepian cult at Epidauros as an interpretive framework for the poem’s laudandus, Hieron of Syracuse. Eisenfeld suggests that Pindar’s cultic language evokes the experiences of worshippers at Epidauros, while the mythic narrative establishes a parallel between Hieron and Asklepios as uniquely blessed mortals. The tension between these interpretive lenses ultimately reinforces Hieron as a uniquely blessed, but fundamentally human, object of praise.
In the final chapter of the book, Eisenfeld reinforces her approach while inviting further readings of epinician poetry grounded in ‘lived religion’. The chapter shows that Nemean 6 consistently features the “boundary-blurring” between human and divine realms that has been the focus of the book. One can envision several future applications of such contextualizing approaches to Greek Lyric beyond Pindaric epinikia. While occasional misprints slowed this reader down, the book compensates these with clear translations of Italian and German scholarship. Overall, Eisenfeld offers exciting new insights into some of Pindar’s most confusing and difficult passages.
References
Currie, B. 2005. Pindar and the Cult of Heroes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kowalzig, B. 2007. Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth and Ritual in Archaic and Classical Greece. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Krummen, E. 1990. Pyrsos Hymnon: festliche Gegenwart und mythisch-rituelle Tradition als Voraussetzung einer Pindarinterpretation (Isthmie 4, Pythie 5, Olympie 1 und 3). Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 35. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Lewis, V. 2020. Myth, Locality, and Identity in Pindar’s Sicilian Odes. Greeks Overseas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pavlou, M. 2010. “Pindar Olympian 3: Mapping Acragas on the Periphery of the Earth.” CQ. 60: 313–26.
Rüpke, J. 2016. On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. Townsend Lectures/Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press.
Notes
[1] Rüpke 2016.
[2] Eisenfeld especially engages with the work of Currie 2005, Krummen 1990, Kowalzig 2007, and Lewis 2020.
[3] Krummen 1990.
[4] Pavlou 2010. Lewis 2020: 179-224, esp. 213, n. 127, citing a talk held by Eisenfeld: Eisenfeld, H. 2017. “How Far Away Is the Edge of the World?” Spring 2017 Langford Conference: Greek Poetry and the West. Florida State University, February 24.