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Aristides’ Construction of Lyric and His Persona
from Part II - Aelius Aristides’ Lyric
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2025
From this chapter, the discussion moves to Aristides’ lyric reception by focusing on his self-fashioning as a superior and divinely inspired speaker. Besides pointing to his knowledge of a super-elite genre, lyric shaped, and was shaped by, Aristides’ self-presentation agenda. Through a close reading of cornerstone texts of Aristidean self-fashioning (e.g. Platonic Orations, To Sarapis, Sacred Tales), this chapter offers the first comprehensive discussion of Pindar as the perfect lyric counterpart to Aristides’ superior persona. It reveals the role of epinician values and Pindaric metapoetics in Aristides’ negotiation of his rivalry with Plato and with poets of hymns, Pindar included. It also shows how discourses of divine inspiration and patronage fed into his self-positioning in relation to imperial power. Far from engaging only with Pindar, however, Aristides’ self-fashioning also built on other, very different lyric models, if only to reject their voices or to turn them on their heads so that they could fit his exceptional self-portrait.
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