First-Person Fictions: Pindar's Poetic "I"

by Mary R. Lefkowitz

This collection of essays, although written over a period of almost 30 years, deals with one who is the I in the odes of the most celebrated ancient Greek poet, Pindar?. since antiquity, the complex and allusive language of the first-person statements has provoked many different answers, Professor Lefkowitz describes the function and nature of Pindar's I statements and proposes a controversial solution that would cause some histories of Greek literature to be rewritten. Rather than accept the view that the identity of the speaker could be subject to instant and unannounced change, she proposes that the voice of the victory odes is the poet himself, in his most professional persona. Professor Lefkowitz also refutes the traditional belief that the odes were sung by a chorus. She shows that in most, if not all cases, they were sung as solos and that Pindar was continuing the tradition established by the Homeric bards.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 26, 1991

About the author

Mary R. Lefkowitz (born April 30, 1935), American scholar of Classics. She studied at Wellesley College before obtaining a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Radcliffe College in 1961. Lefkowitz has published on subjects including mythology, women in antiquity, Pindar, and fiction in ancient biography.
She came to the attention of a wider audience through her criticism of the claims of Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in her book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. In Black Athena Revisited (1996), which she edited with Guy MacLean Rogers, her colleague at Wellesley College, the ideas of Martin Bernal are further scrutinized.