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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
A few years ago, in Greece & Rome of 1978, I recommended an approach to Pindar whereby he should be seen first in his more straightforward and simple compositions, on the grounds that an initial experience of the conventions of the epinician genre in odes for relatively unimportant people would both have immediate value for the understanding of those poems and also enable the student to use that familiarity at a later stage as a background for the understanding of the exotic and untypical compositions which celebrate the victories of the politically important, especially the Sicilian tyrants to whom the first three Olympians and the first three Pythians are dedicated.
1. ‘On First Reading Pindar: The Fifth Isthmian’, G & R 25 (1978), 37–45.
2. This is a possible criticism of R. Hamilton's Epinikion (The Hague, 1974).
3. By far the most important recent discussion of the Fourth Nemean is that in A. Köhnken's Die Funktion des Mythos bei Pindar (Berlin, 1971), pp. 188–219.
4. With regard to the stock moralizing themes, the present poem is less paradeigmatic than the Fifth Isthmian, which illustrated, as if by conscious intention, all seven of the topics listed in the general description (art. cit. 39–40), namely Wealth, Innate Ability, Hard Work, Help of a God, Envy of Men, Jealousy of the Gods, The Song of the Poet. In the Fourth Nemean, only two of these are to be found, The Song of the Poet, and Envy of Men.
5. See J. Peron, Les images maritimes de Pindare (Paris, 1974).
6. P. 9.77 βαι⋯ ⋯ν μακροīσι ποικ⋯λλειν
7. I. 8.40 ενσεβ⋯οτατον
8. The story of Peleus is told in N. 3, N. 5, and I. 8 as well as N. 4. All are odes for Aiginetans.
9. I assume the traditional or alternative readings νἱ⋯ν, ᾂλλος, τε, τάς at lines 16, 39, 64, 67; and modify the usual punctuation at lines 38, 41, and 60.
10. In line 3, νιν is the victor, not yet referred to, but implied in πόνων κεκριμ⋯νων (Köhnken, p. 194)
11. See p. 2; and, for some clarification of the Peleus myth, p. 3.
12. Some commentators have made the mistake here of jumping to the conclusion that the first myth is inappropriate because about Herakles, as in N. 3. Péron (quern tamen honoris causa nomino) falls into this trap (op. cit. n. 5, pp. 93, 95, 100); Köhnken, pp. 195–8, does not
13. The nymphs Thebe and Aigina were sisters (I. 8.17); cf. line 22 above, φίλοιοι γάρ φίλοςς
14. P. 9.87 κωφός ⋯νήρ τις, ὃς ‘Ηρακλεί στόμα μή πριβάλλει’
15. These are the words of Quintilian about Thucydides (X 1.73), ‘semper instans sibi’.
16. E.g. Studia Pindarica II 41.
17. See Thummer, Vol. I, pp. 82, 158; Köhnken, pp. 206–8.
18. σ58c (Drachmann III, p. 74).
19. See σ153 (Drachmann III, p. 87), Köhnken, pp. 206, 208, 219.
20. I am grateful to Dr Ettore Cingano for helpful comments and discussion.