Pindar’s Metaphors: A Study in Rhetoric and Meaning

Pindar’s victory odes have suffered from a curious lack of interest on the part of poststructuralism. Even a first, relatively superficial reading of the surviving corpus, however, reveals an intense interest in and exploitation of rhetorical figures and tropes, and an element of autoreferential self-questioning that throughout the history of Pindaric scholarship has attracted much comment. In view of the radical discontinuity within language postulated by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man between what is meant and the mode of meaning, we can on this basis alone ask what effects the rich figurality of the epinicians might have on what they intend to say. Are expression and intention, in these poems, always simply co-extensive? Or do the odes, read in the context of a series of concerns addressed in recent decades by deconstructive literary theory, reveal instead a level of reflection on the nature of literary language itself to which the hermeneutical assumption of such co-extension does not entirely do justice?