Women and the Nonhuman in Pindar?s Epinician Odes

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Pindar’s diverse representation of female mythological characters and their interactions with the nonhuman world in his epinician odes. I leverage a range of theoretical perspectives to develop original readings of women and the nonhuman in this corpus. I argue that Pindar joins together these two concepts to explore the process of poetic composition, to mediate between competing epichoric ideologies, and to advertise choral poetry’s transformational power. I first examine Pindar’s depictions of women in labor in Olympian 6. I consider how the poikilos aesthetics of this myth intersect with its narrative content of childbirth, and I argue that mothers in labor represent a potent symbol for Pindar’s own work as a poet. I then turn to the Medea of Pythian 4 and argue that Pindar presents Medea as an authoritative epinician poet-figure in this ode. She, like an epinician poet, is a mediator for divine sound and the ultimate authoritative outsider in a community. Next, I focus on the maiden Cyrene of Pythian 9 and the wild epistemology that she embraces. I explore how Cyrene’s bewildering queerness suggests a subversion of colonizing logics and hegemonic claims to authority. I consider this alternative mode of being in the context of the competing ideologies in fifth-century Cyrene. Finally, I focus on the Gorgons of Pythian 12, and I argue that, by foregrounding entanglements between the human and nonhuman, Pindar construes his lamenting Gorgons as a metapoetic image of choral performance.