Abstract
Epinician performance has generated lively debate, with little consensus. Due to lack of evidence, the ode’s première—its sights, sounds, and settings—remains largely unknown. Certain victory odes, though, do make one thing patently clear: not everyone was able to enjoy the performance in person. Specific members of the victor’s family—named fathers and uncles, for example—were missing, due to their preceding death. My dissertation focuses on these ancestral shades, who are both mysteriously absent and present in the odes. The four chapters of the project treat the variations on Pindar’s ancestral motif, used to negotiate the liminal presence of the dead. Sometimes, for example, the poet situates the victor’s ancestors quite close to the joyful moment of epinician celebration (Part One). On other occasions, by contrast, he relegates them to the distant darkness of Hades (Part Two). That separation elicits various kinds of poetic mediation, aimed at reaching the remote ancestors. With such outreach comes the temporal shift from epinician present to future, from première to subsequent reperformance. One kind of afterlife (ancestral) thus initiates another (literary), as Pindar looks to script his own lasting reception. In sum, this dissertation shows the different ways in which Pindaric epinician bridges the gap between the living and the dead; and it explores how such ancestral mediation informs both the poetry and (re)performance of the odes.
Committee Chair
Zoe Stamatopoulou
Committee Members
Timothy Moore
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
Classics
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
12-12-2025
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/nc4g-7h13
Author's ORCID
0009-0003-9084-7001
Recommended Citation
Norton, Bryan, "Echoes of the Dead: The Ancestral Motif in Pindar's Victory Odes" (2025). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 3687.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/nc4g-7h13