In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spontaneity, Savaging, and Praise in Pindar's Sixth PaeanAnne Pippin BurnettThe fragments of Pindar's Sixth Paean—almost all of the opening strophe survives, as well as sixty consecutive lines of mythic narrative1—add up to a complex song that celebrates gracious gods even as its cult cry greets a destructive epiphany. Critical discussion has nonetheless limited itself to two narrow questions: the nature of the song's ceremonial occasion (who sings, and has (...) something gone wrong?), and the relation of its mythic episode to that of Nemean 7 (how is this Neoptolemus tale more offensive than the one told in the epinician?).2 Since these are the established "problems," I shall let them dictate a double approach to what is meant to be a more engaged reading of this Delphic song.First, the actualities of the occasion. Because the opening lines of Paean 6 describe the singers3 as rescuers come in a time of need, most scholars believe that there was something irregular about its performance. The song begins in this way:(1–18)By Olympian Zeus I beg you,mantic golden Pytho, with Aphrodite and the Graces4receive me, songful prophet of the Muses,5at this sacred season,for by Castalia's bronze–fenced springI heard an orphaned sound deprivedof dancing men, and so I cameto guard your citizens from insufficiencyand to defend the honors that are mine. [End Page 494] Obedient to my heart, like child to cherished mother, Ientered Apollo's grove, thisnursery of feasts and crowns where Delphic maidsin throngs sing Leto's sonand strike their feet upon the ground,close to the shady omphalos of Earth.These lines have inspired extended discussion because they seem to report an extraordinary event—the unexpected appearance of a chorus. Who are these singers, scholars ask, and why do they burst, à l'improviste, into a sacred place that is somehow benighted? Wilamowitz supposed that, the usual festival chorus of Delphians having for some reason failed to materialize, Pindar now comes with a group of his own to save the day,6 and this emergency theory, in one form or another, has dominated subsequent discussion. Scholars ask whether the members of this pinch–hitting chorus are locals, Thebans, or perhaps, asWilamowitz supposed, visiting Aeginetans? And they wonder about the exact nature of the crisis. Has a commissioned poem failed to arrive, so that Pindar simply trained the expectant dancers in a last–minute substitute song? Or is it a chorus that has gone missing, one that never got trained or was not dispatched, as it should have been, from abroad? These questions are put and answered in various ways, but all who have written about this song agree almost to a man that its opening speaks for a poet7 who actually rescues a threatened festival by training and bringing [End Page 495] a surprise chorus as an unexpected gift to Delphi.8 I prefer to argue, on the contrary, that this self–portrait of a chorus that hastens to a performance spot is not a bit of Pindaric autobiography but an elegant example of a favorite choral convention, the "arrival fiction."9 The problems of occasion, even that of the dancers' identity, all shift or disappear when the "emergency" of these opening lines is understood as a poetic contrivance.Spontaneity was a professed ideal in the Greek world, and those who performed in any realm simply because they were trained to do so were paradoxically expected to be disorderly and inharmonious (, P. O. 2.86).10 Best celebrations and most truthful praise would come from hearts and minds immediately moved to celebrate and praise, and yet according to Greek festival practice these activities also demanded a multiplicity of participants if they were to have their greatest effect. Ideally, then, a community would give thanks or attempt placation through a group of singing and dancing individuals, each following his own impulsive response to a festive stimulus, all performing with limbs and voices in perfect unison. This was the model offered by the very first singing of a Delphic paean, when all the sailors followed Apollo... (shrink)

Pindar’s songs were composed for men at play, but his poetry was political in its impulse and in its function. The men in question were rich and powerful, and their games were a display of exclusive class attributes, vicariously shared by lesser mortals who responded with gratitude and loyalty . Victories were counted as princely benefactions and laid up as city treasure like the wealth deposited in the treasuries at Delphi . Athletic victory was thus both a manifestation and an (...) enhancement of aristocratic domination, which meant that the poet who praised those who boxed and raced in pan-Hellenic games necessarily praised the social structure that depended on them.Pindar understood his political function and was proud of it—“I would consort with victors” .1 He believed in athletic contest as a model for all human life. He believed in the aristocratic system: “Inherited governance of cities lies properly with the nobility” . He believed also that praise poetry could regulate as well as laud that system, and he believed finally that such poetry was itself incorruptible. Games, song, and princely rulers were all parts of a single brilliant order, and this truth had a linguistic reflection, for the bit that tames a horse, the meter of a poetic line, and the moderation of a ruler were all called by the same name—metron. “Measure inheres in everything” . 1. All translations are my own. Anne Burnett is professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Chicago. Her most recent publications are Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho and The Art of Bacchylides . A monograph on choral poetry, with focus on the Sicilian poet Stesichorus, is forthcoming. (shrink)