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Pindar and his audiences

This thesis explores Pindar's relationship to his audiences. Part One demonstrates how his victory odes take into account an audience present at their premiere performance and also secondary audiences throughout space and time. It argues that getting the most out of the epinicians involves simultaneously assuming the perspectives of both their initial and subsequent audiences. Part Two describes how Pindar uses his audiences' knowledge of other lyric to situate his work both within an immanent poetic history and within a contemporary poetic culture. It sets out Pindar's vision of the literary world past and present and suggests how this framework shapes an audience's experience of his work. Part Three explains how Pindar's victory odes made lucid sense as linear unities to fifth-century Greeks imbued in the traditions of choral lyric. An annotated text shows how each sentence in the epinician corpus forms part of a coherent chain of rational discourse.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:711973
Date January 2015
CreatorsSpelman, Henry Lawlor
ContributorsHutchinson, Gregory O.
PublisherUniversity of Oxford
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:83184846-33cc-41bf-a7d0-8b1f1da5c57d

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