Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past

by Gregory Nagy

Nagy challenges the widely held view that the development of lyric poetry in Greece represents the rise of individual innovation over collective tradition. Arguing that Greek lyric represents a tradition in its own right, Nagy shows how the form of Greek epic is in fact a differentiation of forms found in Greek lyric. Throughout, he progressively broadens the definition of lyric to the point where it becomes the basis for defining epic, rather than the other way around.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Classical Studies

414 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1990

About the author

Gregory Nagy is an American professor of Classics at Harvard University, specializing in Homer and archaic Greek poetry. Nagy is known for extending Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord's theories about the oral composition-in-performance of the Iliad and Odyssey.

Reviews

[Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a long time to read Pindar's Homer, partly because I was busy at times, but mostly because the text is so rich and dense with information that it took a while to digest. Like other books by Gregory Nagy, it delves intensively into linguistic details. But more than any other book of his that I've read, it builds a gigantic case, encompassing not just Homer and Pindar, but other authors like Hesiod, Herodotus, Theognis, and Solon, among others. The book touches on topics like how Homer's work evolved into the written state in which we have inherited it, how certain traditions became pan-Hellenic while others remained locked to local areas, and also builds on topics some of his previous works discussed like how the epic hexameter evolved from the variety of lyric meters (counterintuitive, because Homer's poems are older than any of the surviving texts in lyric meters).

I am only scratching the surface of what this marvelous book includes. I highly recommend it to all who are interested in ancient Greek literature.

[Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

My reading focused on the four chapters in which Nagy treats the stirring (and heretofore unexplored) correspondences between the lyric poetry of Pindar and the ancient world's first great prose achievement, the Histories of Herodotus. Nagy's chapters remain the fundamental study for four aspects of interrelation: the ways in which both writers talk about their own work, the narrators' techniques of establishing authority, the representations of tyranny in both genres, and the convergent purposes of lyric and historiography. John Marincola has pointed out (in the opening chapter of the Cambridge Companion to Herodotus) that more work awaits those who wish to tease out the connections between lyric poetry and Herodotus' project. Nagy's chapters are the essential launchpad for all such studies.