UC Berkeley

This dissertation argues that the victory ode was a genre characterized by formal innovation and experimentation. While much scholarship over the last half century has stressed the existence of rhetorical continuities between the victory ode and other genres of Greek poetry, I emphasize the ways in which these poems set themselves apart. The victory ode came into being late in the life of archaic Greek poetry, and there may have been initial uncertainty on the part of both poets and their patrons as to the generic expectations of these commissions. Examining the surviving victory odes of Pindar and Bacchylides, I explore the innovative and experimental formal approaches employed by the poets to meet the demands of an emergent genre.

The first chapter discusses the victory ode’s presentation of itself as transgressive. Pindar and Bacchylides often bring their mythological accounts to a close with statements marking them as inappropriate. I contend that these moments, rather than representing genuine confessions of transgression, serve to define the boundaries of the genre. Starting with Pythian 4, I argue that Pindar evokes the opposed images of a highway and a shortcut to modulate between the distinct narrative approaches of hexameter epic and symposiastic song. Moving to Pythian 11, I assert that Pindar’s voicing of various tragic speakers throughout the mythological account belies his use of a metonymic crossroads to construe the narrative as an unfortunate deviation in the direction of tragedy. I conclude with Nemean 3, suggesting that the presentation of Herakles’ travels as a digression overlooks the hero’s entanglement in the rhetoric of this individual victory ode and the genre as a whole.

The second chapter examines the effect of direct speech delivered in the voice of a hero or god. I argue that the poets encode interpretive approaches in these passages. Beginning with the exchange between Herakles and Meleager from Bacchylides 5, I suggest that Herakles’ tearful reaction to Meleager’s narrative models an embodied affective response that is meant to be reproduced by the audience, which realizes that Deianeira eventually kills Herakles in the mythological tradition. Moving to Pythian 9, I contend that Chiron’s response to Apollo, which ignores the surface meaning of Apollo’s address, hits instead upon its latent significance, modeling an interpretive mode that the audience might apply in turn to the victory ode.

The third chapter explores the open ending, that is, the phenomenon of victory odes terminating within the mythological narration without returning to the voice of the poet. Beginning with Olympian 4, I demonstrate that by devoting the lone epode to an account of Erginos’ mythological victory in the race in armor, Pindar upends all expectations about how a victory ode should close. Turning to Nemean 1, I assert that he calibrates the metrical structures of the victory ode to counterbalance the disorientation caused by the open ending, which imagines Herakles’ immortal existence on Olympos. I finish with Nemean 10, contending that the poem, which is obsessed with endings, ultimately subverts the very notion of closure by concluding with the promise of speech.

The fourth chapter looks at the cases in which multiple victory odes were commissioned to celebrate the same victory. I argue that, in addition to functioning on their own, these poems should be thought of as forming larger composites. Beginning with Pythian 4 and Pythian 5, I assert that Pindar presents the charioteer Karrhotos in Pythian 5 as a model for the exile Damophilos in Pythian 4. Moving to Nemean 5 and Bacchylides 13, I demonstrate that Pindar and Bacchylides construct between the two poems a multigenerational comparative framework equating Pytheas’ family with the Aiakidai. Concluding with Olympian 1 and Bacchylides 5, I scrutinize the close verbal likenesses between Pindar’s poem and a brief passage from Bacchylides 5, contending that the effect of Bacchylides’ allusion is to reproduce Olympian 1 in miniature.