2. Epinikion as Event

For Dell Hymes the notion of a speech community, one of the fundamental notions of the Ethnography of Speaking, addresses how members of a community conceive of language and emphasizes the ethnographic description of language use (1974:47–51). The previous chapter presented evidence to show that, from the point of view of the community of artists and audiences who participated in epinician performance, epinician language is spoken, not written. The principle of intersubjective objectivity urges, then, a philological method that is dialogically responsive to how Pindar’s language represents itself. As it turns out, the opening of Pindar’s Pythian 1 provides a specific point of departure for building our local knowledge of epinician art: there are certain sâmata ‘signs’ that singers follow when they compose and perform epinikion and that guide the audience’s reception and evaluation of works of epinician art. Pindar’s description of composition in terms of reception and the audience’s co-creation of the communicative exchange highlight the sharedness of those sâmata, so that the signs point to some set of social conventions recognized by singers and audience alike: “communicative activity involves all participants; meaning is constructed within their relationship” (Bonifazi 2004a:391). The remaining chapters of Pindar’s Verbal Art describe the social conventions that epinician composer and audience use in their relationship, beginning in this chapter with another fundamental notion of the Ethnography of Speaking, the speech event (Hymes 1974:52).

Recalling from the Introduction that a register is a style whose use is dedicated to a particular context of situation in accordance with a community’s language conventions, the purpose of this chapter is to describe how Pindar’s epinician texts record ethnographic evidence for the relationship between epinician style and the event of epinician performance. Bauman calls such evidence “the keying of performance” (1977:15–24; Foley 1995:11–17 and 2002:85–93). Entextualized records of performance include features, or keys, that frame the speech event of performance and, through such framing, forge the link between an artistic idiom and the event to which it is dedicated. This idiom-event link is characteristic of a linguistic register. Pindar’s epinikia evidence each performance key that Bauman illustrates: special code, figurative language, parallelism, special paralinguistic features, special formulae, appeal to tradition, and disclaimer of performance. Echoing Bauman, I hasten to stress the suggestive nature of his performance keys, which ultimately are to be discovered ethnographically.

Jakobson (1960:353) and Hymes (1974:10, 13, and 59), who adapts Jakobson’s model of language to the Ethnography of Speaking, apply the term “code” to a communicative vehicle shared by participants in the typical speech events that make up a community’s speech economy. In this sense, a linguistic code is a language—say, ancient Greek. In terms of verbal art, a special linguistic code is a communicative vehicle reserved for use in performance events. The difference between a special code and a register is one of relationality: the special code is one performance key among others that calls attention to the existence of a register. The features of epinikion’s special code include a blend of varieties of ancient Greek, archaizing morphological and lexical features, and prosodic patterning. [1]

We can witness the development of a conventionalized Doric specifically dedicated to choral lyric that enables the reception of choral art by a Panhellenic audience. [2] Doric features distinguish the medium of choral song from all other non-choral types of verbal art, even if this medium also retains formal features of Ionic and Aeolic varieties. [3] The impact of this can be observed in what Leonard Palmer refers to as the “dilution of the Doric element” in choral idiom (Palmer 1980:124). After the mid-fifth century BCE the composition of choral song declines, with the exception of choral odes in tragedy, which retain traces of the Doric dialect (Cf. Horrocks 1997:20). In the Classical Period the occurrence of lexical and morphological Doric features, however limited, by convention links verbal art forms that evidence such features with the event of choral performance. A common feature of Doric is the use of the segment α (a) where η (ê) occurs in other ancient Greek varieties. [4] In Pindar’s special code this alternation occurs in certain words: for example, Doric ναός (naos) ‘temple’ and λαός (laos) ‘the people’ for Ionic νηός (nêos) and ληός (lêos); and in certain morphological forms, particularly the genitive plural noun and adjective ending of the first declension, Doric –ᾶν (–ân) compared to Ionic –ῶν (–ôn).

Aeolic features give archaizing color to the special code associated with choral performance. [5] This archaizing effect derives in part from the fact that Aeolic forms in Pindar are specifically of the Lesbian variety, a species of Aeolic associated with the poetry of Alcaeus and Sappho, whose work predates Pindar. Examples of Aeolicism in Pindar’s choral poetry include –οισ– (–ois–), which occurs, for example, in the feminine participle ending –οισα (–oisa) instead of Ionic –ουσα (–ousa); in third declension dative plural endings Pindar has Aeolic –οισι (–oisi) where Ionic –ουσι (–ousi) occurs; [6] Pindar has Aeolic Μοῖσα (Moisa) ‘Muse’ for Ionic Μοῦσα (Mousa). [7] Pindar’s third-person plural active endings are an example of what Nagy refers to as “the dialectal synthesis of Pindaric diction,” where Doric –οντι (–onti) and Aeolic (specifically Lesbian) –οισι (–oisi) occur “to the exclusion of –ουσι [–ousi],” the Ionic form (1990:417). [8]

The mere occurrence of prosodic patterning distinguishes epinician language as a special artistic idiom. [9] The basic metrical building blocks for Pindar’s epinikia, (1) dactylo-epitrite meter, associated with Doric rhythms, but betraying traces of influence from Ionic traditions, and (2) Aeolic meters, echo the art form’s conventionalized integration of Doric, Aeolic, and Ionic varieties of ancient Greek—with the characteristic dominance of Doric meters. Nagy has observed “that this proportion of Doric/Aeolic/Ionic meters in Pindaric composition corresponds to the dialectal synthesis of Pindaric diction: again we see a pattern of dominant Doric, recessive Aeolic, and residual Ionic” (Nagy 1990:417). Further, the particular features of epinician prosody reinforce what I have said above about the connection between Pindar’s special code and the event of performance: the dominance of Doric features of prosody marks Pindar’s language as available for choral performance, specifically, a distinctive speech event with its idiomatic ways of speaking, interacting, and meaning.

Pindar’s intricately carved opening lines of Olympian 11 are typical of the way in which the poet’s language is foregrounded and semantically dense: [10] The ornate description of rainfall as “waters of the heavens” and appositionally as “rainy children of a cloud” is a figurative gesture whose meaning is context-sensitive. Bundy explains the images of wind and rain as a socially conventional “occupational type” of foil: “here sailors and farmers, who have need of wind and rain, respectively, are foil for achievement in general” (1962:10). This interpretation hinges upon background information shared by the epinician performer and his audience and highlights how meaning is context-specific. By calling attention to the situatedness of the social meaning in epinikion, Bundy’s observation of the “occupational type” of foil indicates how Pindar’s figurative language keys performance: Olympian 11.1–3 is not a statement about rain and winds, taken literally, but has a context-specific function, to serve as a foil for the central message of Olympian 11’s performance.

Praise and blame poetics is another example of how figurative language has more than denotational meaning. [11] One word that Pindar uses to refer to epinikion is ainos ‘praise’; [12] cognate verbal forms are ainein ‘to praise’ [13] and epainein ‘to praise’. [14] Opposing this designation for the poetics of praise is the designation for blame poetics, psogos ‘fault-finding’. [15] Also indicative is psogeros ‘bitter-tongued’; Nagy describes the passage in which this epithet occurs, Pythian 2.55–56, as “a programmatic description of blame poetry…as the opposite of praise poetry, in the specific context of rejecting blame within a poem of praise” (Nagy 1990:24): “bitter-tongued [psogeros] Archilochus with heavy–worded hatred fattening himself…” (ψογερὸν Ἀρχίλοχον βαρυλόγοις ἔχθεσιν / πιαινόμενον). While the opposition between praise and blame is explicit here, Nagy shows that this opposition is implicit even if it is not expressed: the potential of praise is blame, and vice versa. [16] In other words, praise and blame poetics entails an implicated meaning that contrasts with the literal, strictly denotational meaning of ainos and semantically related language. Since composer and audience share the same special code in order to carry off the communicative exchange, such implicated meaning indicates how figurative language partitions the performance event as a special context in which that implicated meaning makes sense, keying performance.

Bauman defines parallelism as “the repetition, with systematic variation, of phonic, grammatical, semantic, or prosodic structures, the combination of invariant and variant elements in the construction of an utterance” (Bauman 1977:19). [17] Epinikion exhibits elaborate and mutually imbricated patterns of regularity: prosodic structure and the patterned repetition of words, sounds, or themes. [18] Such patterned regularities enable an audience to evaluate a performer’s communicative competence on the basis of how well or poorly she creates and sustains a pattern of expectancy, while also artfully manipulating it within conventionally established parameters (Bauman 1977:19). In all epinician songs, prosody involves at least three patterns of repetition: (1) the basic metrical structure of an individual song is either dactylo-epitrite or Aeolic; (2) there is patterned repetition among individual lines; (3) there is patterned repetition at the level of strophic structure. For further examples of parallelism, Carola Greengard has described in detail aspects of formal arrangement in epinikion that involve the “adaptation and derivation of the archaic structure of ring composition” (1980:15): [19] framing, chiasmus, and recurrent diction. Devices that shape frames are recurrent diction, tautometric responsion, “cases in which similar rather than identical words are involved,” compound words, and “repeated patterns of sound and/or rhythm” (Greengard 1980:19–22). Although Greengard does not identify them as such, these structural features are forms of parallelism: they key—or re-key for the modern audience—epinician performance.

In its entextualized state epinician language retains few paralinguistic features, such as “rate, length, pause duration, pitch contour, tone of voice, loudness,” which are superimposed on or co-occurring with ordinary phonetic features of language (Bauman 1977:20). A feature of Pindar’s special code and an example of parallelism, prosody is also a paralinguistic feature that organizes the flow of speech according to artistic rules for vocal sound patterns. Although we have no record for the mode of epinician song—no information about paralinguistic features that may have been associated with singing—the mere fact that epinikion is a sung form of communication indicates that such paralinguistic features serve by convention to key epinician performance. [20]

Special formulae are, “in effect, markers of specific genres, and insofar as these genres are conventionally performed in a community, the formulae may serve as keys to performance” (Bauman 1977:21). [21] Bundy gives the following formulaic elements of epinikion:

• a “transitional formula” signals the end of a descriptive passage and moves a song from a foil to the central topic, the laudandus’s achievement (1962:2–3);
• ἴσθι νῦν (isthi nun) ‘know now’: νῦν (nun) ‘now’ frequently occurs “in the introduction of climactic terms” of a priamel and ἴσθι (isthi) ‘know’ is “the regular asseveration” that follows a summary priamel (20);
• “the formulaic designation of the laudandus’s home city” (21n48 and 23n53);
• the “gnomic climax” of a summary foil, through which the composer asserts the importance of propriety (37);
• ἀλλά (alla) ‘but’ and καὶ νῦν (kai nun) ‘and now’ are “formulaic” in climaxes to a name priamel (37–38);
• the “σιγά [siga ‘silence’] motive” which “implies that to overdo a subject brings the speaker little pleasure, and…to know when to cease may actually increase it” and “concerns itself with the advantage or disadvantage of the speaker in terms of audience reaction” (75, emphasis in original); [22]
• the “χρέος-τεθμός [khreos-tethmos ‘necessity-assignment’] motive,” through which the composer expresses the necessity of sticking to his topic, the “assignment” (42);
• motifs associated with the theme of the “praise of wealth and its proper use”: “(1) εὐεργεσία [euergesia ‘act of kindness’] (good works, liberality, indifference to gain); (2) human expectations (shared humanity, human dependence on God or fate); and (3) enduring fame (occasionally literal immortality)” (86–87).

None of these are formulae in the sense of “special phrases,” as described in Foley’s discussion of performance keys in How to Read an Oral Poem: “the guslar’s (and Bishop Njegoš’s) ‘well-wrought tower’ or ‘shaggy brown horse’ or Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ or the Old English poet’s ‘foamy-necked ship’” (Foley 2002:90). If we consider verbal art as performance cross-culturally, then we should not expect that special formulae will always be phraseological words, like the Homeric epithet, or that they are “of equal importance in all oral poetries,” as Foley stipulates (Foley 2002:90). I will show in Chapters Three and Four that the ways of epinician speaking—stylistic patterns that constitute the epinician way of speaking—are discursive formulae that are conventional to epinikion. [23] The Appendix to Pindar’s Verbal Art presents evidence suggesting that the use of these ways of epinician speaking are so highly patterned that deviations from such patterns can be artistically meaningful. When special formulae occur, even conceived in terms of the list of Bundy’s formulaic conventions of epinikion, they serve, along with other performance keys, to segment performance as a specially framed speech event. [24]

An appeal to tradition keys performance by referring to traditional conventions as a standard for the audience’s evaluation of the performer’s verbal artistic competence (Bauman 1977:21). “Either explicitly or implicitly,” as Foley describes this key to performance, “oral poets are constantly establishing and reestablishing the authority of their words…by reaffirming their ties to an ongoing way of speaking, to an expressive mode larger than any one individual” (Foley 2002:91). Pindar’s use of humnos ‘song of praise’ illustrates his explicit appeals to tradition. As Calame has argued, the example of Pindar’s Nemean 5, whose mythological narrative depicts the Muses, led by Apollo, performing during the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, shows that humnos “defines itself as a song in which gods and heroes are celebrated” (2001:75). Calame goes on to make the important observation that the diversity of ways in which Archaic Greek forms of song use the term humnos indicates that it is not considered a lyric genre until the Alexandrian period (2001:78). As a strategy in a song of praise, rather than a genre of verbal art, Pindar at times appeals to the tradition of humnos. Olympian 2, for example, begins with an invocation addressed to humnoi: This passage is an appeal to tradition, serving to locate Olympian 2 in relation to existing conventions for praise associated with the strategy of humnos. Rather than resorting to literal exegesis to interpret Pindar’s references to song and dance, we can more empirically interpret them as explicit appeals to tradition that key performance, as in the passage’s opening, where Pindar aligns his composition with the traditional humnos. Some examples of other explicit appeals to tradition include references to Homer, a past authority who demonstrates the power of persuasive speech to create an enduring record of action (Pythian 4.277, Nemean 7.21, and Isthmian 4.37); [25] one reference to Arkhilokhos (Olympian 9.1) positively compares that poet’s art with epinician praise; [26] another, discussed above, specifically contrasts Pindar’s praise poetry with Arkhilokhos’ blame poetry (Pythian 2.55).

We have already seen examples of implicit appeals to tradition: (1) the Doric features of the epinician way of speaking are an implicit appeal to traditions of choral song; (2) the prosodic features of Pindar’s epinikia are an implicit appeal to traditions of Archaic Greek song as opposed to poetry; [27] (3) Aeolic features of epinician language are an implicit appeal to tradition that connects Pindar’s songs with older predecessors; (4) Pindar’s praise and blame poetics is an implicit appeal to the traditional poetics of ainos. Whether explicit or implicit, Pindar’s appeals to tradition key epinician performance by inviting an audience to interpret and evaluate his songs on the basis of conventional and communal standards for performance.

A first-person voice often interrupts the course of Pindar’s songs, a phenomenon that is part of the motivation for the hypothesis that Pindar uses an “oral subterfuge” to represent his putatively written compositions as spontaneous speech. [28] These Abbruchsformeln ‘break-off formulas’ can be thought of as saying one thing and doing another, in the sense that Foley (2002:93) explains disclaimers of performance: “saying you can’t means asserting that you can and you will.” [29] Here is an example of such a break-off: In this passage Pindar displays his observance of the conditions for appropriate speech expressed by gnomic statements that occur earlier in the song: One example of “stories crafted with ornate lies” is the story that Pelops’ ivory shoulder replaced the flesh and bone shoulder eaten by Demeter in another version of the Pelops story. By refusing to tell such a story (Olympian 1.52), Pindar observes the conditions for propriety communicated at Olympian 1.28–29. This is one sense in which Pindar says one thing and does another: by saying that he will not tell a deceptive story, he performs a display of his competence in the appropriate use of speech. In this respect, we can see the break-off at Olympian 1.52 as an example of Bundy’s siga-motif, a Pindaric formula that corresponds to Bauman’s characterization of the disclaimer of performance, which “serves as a moral gesture, to counterbalance the power of performance to focus heightened attention on the performer, and a key to performance itself” (1977:23).

There is another sense in which Pindar says one thing and does another at Olympian 1.52 because this disclaimer occurs after Pindar has actually told the deceptive story that he refuses to tell (Olympian 1.46–51). Although Pindar distances himself from this deceptive story with the statement at line 52, through the strategy of reporting the story in indirect discourse, and by attributing it to an untrustworthy source, “a jealous neighbor” (line 48), it is still a component of his composition; he says one thing and does another. [31] In the context of Olympian 1 as a whole, Pindar reproduces the deceptive story about how Pelops got his ivory shoulder to heighten the contrast with his own version of the story. To report the deceptive story is an implicit appeal to tradition through which Pindar displays his ability to produce the famous version of the story that he de-selects.

A crucial implication of the dedicated use of epinician language in epinician performance, the consequence of the fact that epinician language is a register, is that epinikion entails culture-specific ways of meaning. The communicative means used in epinician performance key that performance event as such, and this keying sets up a special frame for the interpretation of messages, so that it “contrasts with at least one other frame, the literal” (Bauman 1977:9). [32] Epinician performance keys enable an audience, ancient or modern, to evaluate and interpret epinikion in terms of the art form’s idiomatic, connotative meaning. Given that epinikion is a speech event, as the epinician performance keys indicate, our recognition of the existence of a conventional event-idiom link supports a further conclusion: Pindar is an oral poet. The special code, figurative language, forms of parallelism, and special paralinguistic features unambiguously cue audiences, both ancient and modern, to treat epinikion as a speech event, not a writing/reading event. Special formulae, appeals to tradition, and disclaimers of performance regulate the reception of each epinician song according to song and performance traditions and according to participation rules for performance—especially the participation of the audience as critical and highly competent evaluators of epinikion. In the next two chapters I will describe the ways of epinician speaking that constitute the epinician way of speaking, paving the way toward an understanding of the strategies of epinician oral composition.