Group A Blog #3

This week we read Pindar's Olympian and Pythian Odes. I was interesting in Olympian Ode 1 decided to great Hieron of Syracuse who won the single horse race in the olympic games. Pindar tells the story of Pelops and his father Tantalos. I thought it was interesting that there are many tellings of this story. In the old version, Tantalos feeds his dismembered son in a stew to the gods at a banquet. Pindar states, "one of the envious neighbors immediately said in secret/that into water boiling rapidly on the fire/they cut up your limbs with a knife,/and for the final course distributed your flesh/around the table and ate it" (Olympian 1, lines 47-51). The gods realize what has happened and they bring Pelops back to life with his ivory shoulder. They then sentence Tantalos to a life with Hades in the Underworld. I thought that this was an odd way for the story begin. It seemed pretty dark that Tantalos would feed his son to the gods just to introduce Pelops' ivory shoulder.

Pindar tells the story with Pelops being born with the ivory shoulder and Tantalos getting punished for stealing nectar and ambrosia from the gods. Poseidon falls in love with Pelops and brings his to Olympus, but he is brought back to earth because of his father's actions. Throughout reading these odes, I find it really interesting how intermingled life was with religion in ancient Greece. All Greek stories involve the gods being active in life. The gods often picked favorites and really determined the outcomes of many major events, like the Trojan War. These heroes are shown as being of very high status but they come nowhere near to marveling the gods.

Comments

  1. Dean NollOctober 10, 2018 at 8:34 AM

    I found it interesting how you found the difference and similarities between each of the stories. I agree that the gods typically picked favorites . Since the gods did pick favorites, this changed many outcomes of different stories. It seems as if the gods always determine a persons fate.

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