Group B Blog Post: Pindar

For this week's blog post, I want to focus on the relationship between Pindar and the Odes that he wrote. In the article titled And the Winner is... Pindar! by Stephanie Burt, I thought that it was interesting that families of victors would pay Pindar to compose a poem about them and their victorious moments. In the article, it says that "the family of a winning boxer paid Pindar to compose verse about the event, which was then performed, with music and dancing" (Burt 1). As you can see, Pindar is seen as a glorious writer because so many families of winning athletes are paying him to compose poems about them. Because Pindar was such a popular writer at the time, many of his stories connect to the modern Olympics and there are so many similarities that I didn't even realize. For example, the article states that "The 1984 Los Angeles and 2004 Athens Olympics included classical scholars reciting Pindar, or reading their own commissioned "Pindaric odes" (Burt 2). Because the Pindaric odes are so famous and his poems talk about many athletic events that are still used in the modern Olympics, there is definitely a disconnect about the modern Olympics and where they even come from. If you ask someone about the ancient Olympics, I bet that very few people know who Pindar is.

Back to the fact that many families payed Pindar to compose Odes about a winning athlete in the family, Olympian 10 is especially interesting because it talks about how Pindar forgot his agreement to compose the ode. As a result, he agrees to "pay the debt" by composing a detailed ode about Herakles founding the Olympic games. In the beginning of Olympian 10, Pindar states, "For what was then the future has approached from afar and shamed my deep indebtedness. Nevertheless, interest on a debt can absolve one from a better reproach. Let see him now..." (Olympian 10, lines 6-9). From this part of the Ode, I noticed that Pindar is acknowledging that he forgot to write the Ode and will pay back the debt by writing one (which is Olympian 10). He is writing the Ode for a victor from Lokroi in Italy which is Hagesidamos's son.

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 1, 2018 at 12:40 PM

    It is interesting that Pindar was such a profound writer that people would pay him to write odes about them. I believe they did this not only because they wanted personal glory but as well as glory for their city and family's. I'm sure the victors never imagined that their ode would possibly recited at the 2004 Olympic Games, back in Greece. You could argue that in a way Pindar has largely affected our views about athletics as a whole.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dean NollOctober 10, 2018 at 8:37 AM

    I also found it intriguing how people would pay him just to write odes about themselves. I do believe that people not only did this for themselves, but they did it for everyone in their city. Much like the olympics today, athletes represent their countries too with pride.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alison LillaOctober 15, 2018 at 9:21 AM


    I think you make a great point that Pindar was a paid writer. Today, a lot of writers like to write for “themselves” and they hate to think that they’d have to write for pay. Whereas, Pindar took pride in his work and saw writing for others as an elevating platform (as opposed to one that limits creativity). The article “And the Winner is… Pindar” points out that he used complicated rhyme meter as his own athletic accomplishment.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Group B Blog Post

I felt like analyzing Midnight in Paris was one of my most enjoyable classes of the year personally. It was good to get away from literature and briefly touch on film for a change, so I enjoyed it. From the article we only really talked about topic, the left to right duality with left being "good" and right being "bad". Just in that one paragraph alone, so many film elements were mentioned and what they mean to the film. There are too many to talk about in just one blog post, but his class must have been intense analyzing all of the aspects he brought up. One of the film perspectives was the idea of dominance when someone is higher on the screen and this was reflected a lot in the movie. Gil's fiancee was often shown towering over Gil because she always got what she wanted in the movie and was a negative influence on him. Something else I found interesting was the color contrast in the movie. When he was in his regular life, everything was light and almost bland...
Read more

Norman Mailer on Boxing

All -- I've attached a message from a colleague of mine below; a more tragic end to this piece than to the Ali pieces. SS Here's another piece of boxing belles-lettres I've never forgotten: Norman Mailer -- who also wrote about the Rumble in the Jungle and features in that documentary, When We Were Kings  -- on the death of Benny Paret: Paret was a Cuban, a proud club fighter who had become welterweight champion because of his unusual ability to take a punch. His style of fighting was to take three punches to the head in order to give back two. At the end of ten rounds, he would still be bouncing, his opponent would have a headache. But in the last two years, over the fifteen-round fights, he had started to take some bad maulings. This fight had its turns. Griffith won most of the early rounds, but Paret knocked Griffith down in the sixth. Griffith had trouble getting up, but made it, came alive and was dominating Paret again before the round ...
Read more

Iliad Blog Post Group B

The presence of divine intervention and the role of fate are themes that really struck me as we read the selected passages of the Iliad. Examples of divine intervention appear in the very beginning of book one when Chryse prays to Apollo to plague the Achaeans. Apollo answers his prayer and the Achaeans start to die of the disease. The presence of the Gods in the Iliad plays a major role in the plot progression. Athena also appears by Achilles size in book one and prevents him from killing Agamemnon. If the mortals were left to their own devices and the Gods didn't intervene with the plot then this piece of literature may have turned out much differently. The dream that Zeus sends to Agamemnon in book 2 is interpreted as a sign of fate, yet it is just a trick to harm the Achaeans. The interests of the Gods in the lives of the mortals are what drive the narrative forward. If Hera had not sent Athena to stop the Achaeans from sailing away, then there would most likely not be a story ...
Read more