- A Variation of the Pindaric Break-off in Nemean 4
The Pindaric break-off is a provocative technique, to modern tastes at least. It literally breaks the dramatic illusion in a radical manner and projects an ambiguous picture of the poet. On the one hand the artist seems not entirely in control of his demanding material; on the other, he appears fully aware of both the precepts of aristocratic interaction, the guest-friendship relationship of poet and client, and his divine poetic gift that allows him to detect the best way to immortalize the victor and execute the song in the most impeccable fashion. It is characteristic that in extant Greek literature the break-off motif reappears only in Hellenistic poets who valued and exploited all means of putting together an out-of-the-ordinary poem.1 The modern scholarly consensus on break-offs clashes with older views which go back to the scholia.2 When Pindar uses break-offs, they function in a meaningful and elegant way and are not to be taken at face value as expressions of genuine on the poet's part or recognition of a problem in the composition. It is equally unhelpful to consider them a mere empty motif, a sort of formula employed to no particular end. This is not to say that the [End Page 17] break-off might not have been traditional in Greek choral lyric.3 Since so little of this profuse genre has survived, this possibility cannot be excluded and the technique is certainly employed by Bacchylides (5.100-1 and 10.41-42; cf. Simonides fr. 10).4 But the traditional character would not automatically rob the break-off of claims to literary import.
Despite this general agreement, break-offs do remain among the most problematic Pindaric passages. For one, they are not uniform: in the so-called hush passages (e.g. O. 1.28-35, 9.35-41, 13.91, N. 5.14-18) the poet refuses to tell or continue a particular tale that he judges unacceptable on moral/religious grounds. These passages will not concern me here.5 Instead, I will focus on another type of break-off where Pindar states his intention to abandon the specific, usually mythic, thread he has been pursuing because time is pressing on and he should take up either the praise, i.e. the explicit praise, of the victor and his lineage or another myth deemed more appropriate for the "moment."6 Among odes with this type of break-off N. 4 holds a prominent position because it includes not just one but two break-offs and has generated much discussion on account of the first one:
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(N. 4.33-43)
At first sight it is surprising that this particular ode would present interpretive difficulties at all because it is one of the most elegantly and clearly articulated in the Pindaric corpus.7 When considered in its entirety, the ode's most pleasant characteristic is the near perfect structural and thematical symmetry, from the overall distribution and arrangement of stanzas and themes to details like number of lines devoted to specific motifs and verbal echoes that connect passages with each other. From a total of twelve stanzas six are devoted to the victor Timasarchus and his family and six to the achievements of the glorious Aeginetan heroes of the past, the Aeacids. The praise of the victor and his family is placed at the beginning and end of the ode, with three stanzas (N. 4.1-24) preceding and three (N. 4.73-96) following the mythic section (N. 4.25-68).8 The beginning of the ode deals with the victorious athlete (N. 4.9-24) and the end with his maternal uncle, Callicles (N. 4.79-90), both coupled with their fathers, Timocritus and Euphanes, who were competent musicians. Pindar also extols his own song in the first and last stanza. The mythic section narrates in some detail the victories of Telamon (N. 4.25-32) and Peleus (N. 4.54-68) which are separated by a catalog of other Aeacids, the first two being sons of Telamon (N. 4.46-48...