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On Being Vatic: Pindar, Pragmatism, and Historicism
- American Journal of Philology
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 127, Number 2 (Whole Number 506), Summer 2006
- pp. 159-184
- 10.1353/ajp.2006.0029
- Article
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In this paper I argue that the large truth claims made in Pindar's gnomic language have a correspondingly large cultural function since they instantiate the capacity for unprecedented conceptual invention within a culture that lacks any master discourse in which its own self-understanding is embedded. I discuss the famous Nomos basileus fragment and its handling by Callicles in Plato's Gorgias, and by Hölderlin in his Pindar Fragments. I argue that, by using Pindar's claim as a starting point for reflections of their own, these thinkers recognize its contingency, and future orientation, as vatic speech.