Robert Fowler’s contribution to Bloomsbury’s ‘New Directions in Classics’ series is a relatively slim volume, but its length belies the richness and complexity of its arguments. The monograph undertakes an exploration of Pindar as poet and of the aesthetics of his poetry through the lens of the sublime. This scope is as capacious as it sounds, and has something of the Pindaric about it, in the sense that any attempt to summarize its contents risks missing the point. The monograph consists of three substantial chapters bookended by a brief preface and an even briefer epilogue; within each chapter, subheadings provide orientation, though one is sometimes carried along as though on Horace’s Pindaric torrent, best served by taking in the sweeping vistas as they come.
The first chapter, ‘Sublime Receptions’, pursues two related narratives: the early modern reception of Pindar and conceptions of the sublime, both explored with an eye to the way that they can inform a reading of Pindar. Anticipating the complexity of the ensuing discussion, Fowler foregrounds some key themes: ‘the “sublime” style (“enthusiasm”); the nature of poetic genius; emotional and cognitive aspects of the sublime (analysis of the observer’s mental state); political aspects of the sublime; art and myth as gateways to ultimate truth and transcendent reality; language and the sublime; and lyric’s technique of parataxis (juxtaposition)’ (6–7). The chapter develops as a historical tour through approaches to Pindar and/or the sublime, with stops at Boileau, Perrault, Herder, Burke, Kant and Schiller, and culminating with Hölderlin, a section in which theories of the sublime and Pindaric engagement come together in a rousing discussion of poetic genre, translation theory and the relationship of both to the idea of the transcendent.
A close reading of Pythian 1 opens the second chapter, ‘Shared Experience’, which addresses fundamental Pindaric questions, including what we should talk about when we talk about Pindar’s audiences, the identity of the Pindaric ‘I’ and the importance of occasion, with an eye to how all of these contribute to the evocation of the sublime. Fowler’s approaches to these questions are bound up with a recent turn in Pindaric scholarship which emphasizes Pindar’s poetry as poetry, originating in but not confined by the contexts of the first performance, an angle recently argued by, among others, Boris Maslov, Pindar and the Emergence of Literature (Cambridge 2015), who appears as a frequent interlocutor. For Fowler, the indeterminacy of speaker, time, place and audience evoked by Pindar’s poems creates the opportunity for the emergence of the sublime. To stick with his opening example of Pythian 1, the inexhaustible and layered referents of the ode’s images (the evocation of the golden lyre which is at once Apollo’s, the lyre heard by an ancient audience and the lyre imagined by a modern reader; the evocation of dancers who may or may not be present in performance; the vivid depiction of Etna so that even readers more than two thousand years later can see the eruption) create, as Fowler puts it, an ‘excess of meaning’ (69) which invites audiences (in the broadest sense) into the sublime.
The third chapter, ‘Exceeding Limits’, turns its attention to matters of myth, religion, language and time. Two orientations are provided early in the chapter, first, to the landscape of Greek religion and myth and then, glancing back to Hölderlin, a discussion of immanence and transcendence, concepts that will be fundamental to the following arguments. Coming back to Pindar, Fowler conceptualizes a vertical movement that invites mortals into a sort of divine experience and also invites gods down into the mortal world. As he puts it, ‘These two movements up and down … meet on a transcendent level where meaning resides, both that which can and that which cannot be represented. In other words, these are potentially sublime moments’ (147). Pindar’s myths, he argues, construct boundaries in ways that create hesitation, for example, how to balance the ambition to be like the mythical heroes while recognizing human limitations. This uncertainty, the entry point to the sublime, also occurs at the level of language, an effect that Fowler highlights in Pindar’s metaphors.
Pindar and the Sublime is both thought-provoking and challenging. I sometimes found myself wishing for further integration of the frameworks derived from the early modern thinkers in Chapter 1 with Fowler’s Pindaric examples which are much more prominent in chapters 2 and 3. I suspect that readers with limited familiarity in either area will find themselves intermittently overwhelmed. But perhaps this is inevitable in a book of this sort: every page bursts with Fowler’s palpable passion for his subject and demonstrates the invigorating possibilities of reading Pindar as a poet of the sublime and, more broadly, in conversation with both his early modern readers and the many contemporary theorists of lyric whom Fowler adduces throughout the book.
