Pindar’s Poetics of Immortality

Modern scholarship tends to focus on the social, political, and eco
nomic 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
intrapoetic 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.