![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Race provides brief introductions to each ode and full explanatory footnotes, offering the reader invaluable guidance to these often difficult poems. Readers have long savored them for their rich poetic language and imagery, moral maxims, and vivid portrayals of sacred myths. In these complex poems, Pindar commemorates the achievement of athletes and powerful rulers against the backdrop of divine favor, human failure, heroic legend, and the moral ideals of aristocratic Greek society. His forty-five victory odes celebrate triumphs in athletic contests at the four great Panhellenic festivals: the Olympic, Pythian (at Delphi), Nemean, and Isthmian games. Like Simonides and Bacchylides, Pindar wrote elaborate odes in honor of prize-winning athletes for public performance by singers, dancers, and musicians. ![]() Race now brings us, in two volumes, a new edition and translation of the four books of victory odes, along with surviving fragments of Pindar's other poems. Most of the Greek lyric poets come down to us only in bits and pieces, but nearly a quarter of Pindar's poems survive complete. 518-438 BCE) was "by far the greatest for the magnificence of his inspiration" in Quintilian's view Horace judged him "sure to win Apollo's laurels." The esteem of the ancients may help explain why a good portion of his work was carefully preserved. ![]()
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