Pindar's Library: Performance Poetry and Material Texts by Tom Phillips (review)

Pindar makes an excellent example for understanding the mechanisms of reception in the Hellenistic period: since it is ideal for philological dissection, the Pindaric corpus illustrates the gulf existing between poetry composed for musical performance and the book culture of later ages. The divide between an audience which perceives an ode through performance and a reader who meticulously examines it as a material text, and hence their radically different comprehension of the very same poem, is exactly what makes Pindar's case fascinating. If we add to this the historical and cultural contexts of the early fifth century and the legendary obscurity of the odes, Pindar must have represented an intellectual challenge for his ancient (as well as for his modern) readers. Tom Phillips' monograph entitled Pindar's Library, a revised version of his 2012 DPhil thesis, investigates this particular aspect of Pindaric reception.

In the lengthy Introduction (1–46) the author sets his goals and explains his method of research. A premise underlying both is that ancient commentators and readers have viewed the notion of writing as central for the interpretation of the Pindaric odes; thus, the image of Pindar as a writer and the various degrees of textuality (gathering and ordering the poems in editions, colometrization, addition of critical signs by Hellenistic scholars, etc.) are juxtaposed with the traditional way of engaging with epinician poetry, namely through performance. Phillips, however, is wary of viewing performance and reading as mutually exclusive functions; in his view, both are complementary modes of interpretation, and it is through their virtual interaction that the Pindaric odes are redefined throughout the centuries. A large part of the Introduction is oriented towards modern theory, highlighting the material aspects of the book and the response of readers (theorists mentioned in passing include McDonald, Derrida, and Jauss). Building on these interpretative models, Phillips explains that he will study the Pindaric corpus as a diachronic text interacting with the shifting contexts of each reading "era." Intertextuality also provides a key to reading the Pindaric corpus through the eyes of others (e.g. authors such as Callimachus and Theocritus) and so do cultural and scholarly receptions. Whereas the theoretical part of the Introduction is indispensable to the understanding of the author's methodology, Phillips tends sometimes to get carried away into over-theorizing his case and becoming obscure even for the academic reader. However, in providing an overview of Pindaric scholarship on matters of performance, contextualization, and reading of the epinicians in the last part of the Introduction, Phillips counterbalances the first more abstract part and provides the necessary opening to the core study.

The study falls into two distinctive sections: in the first "Contexts: To Alexandria and Beyond" (47–117), Pindaric scholarly reception and readers' responses in the Hellenistic era are scrutinized, while in the second, "Singing Pages" (119–281), certain epinician odes are paradigmatically analyzed in the light of the various reading horizons developed in antiquity.

Hellenistic scholarship on Pindar against the background of the Alexandrian library and its intellectual cycles is the subject matter of the first chapter ("Texts and Metatexts," 49–83). Phillips first reviews the evidence concerning the Hellenistic editions and scholia on Pindar and suggests that it was especially in the late Hellenistic and early Imperial period that changes in editorial practices became evident and the scholiastic tradition on the odes was significantly enhanced. Later readers of the Pindaric corpus were also in a better position to accurately date the poems in contrast to the less informed fourth-century audiences: as Phillips argues, the growing awareness of the historical contexts of the odes led the major commentators of Pindar, namely Aristarchus and Didymus, to evaluate the Pindaric odes as historical records and consequently "historicize" their scholia. In concluding this chapter, Phillips elaborates on the idea that Pindar's readers, as opposed to the audiences of his performances, had access to both the "authentic" text as well as to various metatexts, and thus critical...