Richard P. Martin

Hesiod's Metanastic Poetics

The received wisdom about Hesiods poetics is simple: he is no Homer. His poetry is supposedly rough, awkward, unsophisticated, repetitive, disjointed, a second-best versifiers striving after effect. Too often the rhetoric even of those who respect Hesiodic poetry damns it with faint praise. Readers of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics —to take just one easily available reference that students might consult—learn that Hesiods ‘didactic epics’ were meant for the peasant of Boeotia rather than the Ionian aristocrat, being concerned with the morality and beliefs of the small farmer toughly confronting a life of ceaseless labor and few rewards. While they cannot be compared to Homers works in scope or genius, they often display much poetic power.

HOME IS THE HERO: DEIXIS AND SEMANTICS IN PINDAR PYTHIAN 8

Pythian 8, probably the last epinikion Pindar composed, is unusual in the way it points elsewhere: of all the odes for Aiginetan victors, only this one fails to employ a myth related to the family of Aiakos. Instead, through its central narration of an Argive tale and through a complex network of pathways, the poem ties the victor’s home island to a number of other landscapes. Even more ambitiously, through several elaborate figural systems, Pindar maps out a vast parallel space within which gods, heroes, athletes, kings, mortals, and poets interact. The poetic construction of such a cosmos produces a vivid sense of powerful contiguities at work in the world. 1 But how does it all happen? The specific technique employed to bring about this effect, the means by which Pindar builds his triumphant, unifying assertion, is worth articulating. Not only is such an investigation of this much-studied ode still lacking; the explication may provide a useful tool for reading other archaic Greek poetry. For Pythian 8, pushing, as it does, the limits of choral poetic art, demands that we, in turn, expand our critical horizons to find new ways to understand and describe its ancient artistry. Invoking the notion of deixis is one step along this road. 2

Words Alone are Certain Good(s): Philology and Greek Material Culture

The relation between philology and the study of material culture within Classics has been long and complex. Where does it now stand? At the request of the editor of TAPA, in conjunction with the journal’s recent focus on material culture, the author attempts to sum up some major trends. After an overview of historical developments, this article investigates the current practices and positions of those who are trying to bridge the divide between the “dirt” and the “word.” A fourfold set of common methodological approaches is described, followed by a fourfold division of ways in which text and object might be seen as interacting.