This professes to be a poetic commentary to the Nemean odes of Pindar. It argues for a re-evaluation of this poet's epinikia as poetry and has taken as its principal focus the stuff that is critically ignored or devalued. Much that Pindar writes is difficult in that it is at once dense and dynamic, obedient to the strictures of a genre and yet never ruled by them. He invites commentary and scholars have for the most part centred their considerable efforts on decoding genius. There is as much literature on the poet and his relatively inaccessible work as there is an absence of poetic appreciation of it. The desire for a system of language, a master decoder of metaphor, imagery and thought processes, and the desire to find unity of thought, for Grundgedanken , for correspondences, structural parallels and polarities is the engine that drives the philologist reading these odes. But Pindar defies system.

This commentary to Pindar's Nemean 6 was inspired as much by the absence of recent modern criticism as by the presence of those venerable works on the Nemean odes by Fennell, Bury and Farnell. I determined to examine these commentaries in particular since they are basic to any critical approach. I next determined to include more contemporary criticism which was either directed to the Nemean 6 in particular, or was generally applicable. I was guided in my selection of points of interest as much by personal curiosity as by a sense of their poetic, thematic, structural, syntactical, or textual importance. In the interest of private safety as well as sanity, I have avoided any analysis of metre, except where it has been utterly unavoidable.

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