Pindar's Poetics of Immortality

Book excerpt: Modern scholarship tends to focus on the social, political and economic information that can be gleaned from Pindar's treatment of the subject of his victory odes - the athlete who brings immortality to his family and polis. In this book, Asya C. Sigelman offers a new approach to the odes, exploring the fact that Pindar's language and imagery suggest that the athlete's victory is only a weaker version of the poet's immortalizing feat. Examining several central Pindaric images, Sigelman shows that they are fundamentally reflexive, structured as expressions of poetic creativity engaged in a perpetual synthesis of intra-poetic time - of the unity of the past, present and future of the world of Pindar's song. As the book's case studies of several of the odes demonstrate, this synthesis is key to Pindar's notion of immortalization and constitutes the central poetic subject of Pindar's song which underlies and informs its praise of the victorious athlete.