A groundbreaking study of the interaction of poetry, performance, and
the built environment in ancient Greece.
Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Classics by the Association
of American Publishers
In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a new, integrated
approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology" that combines
literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic
materials. At the heart of the book is the great poet Pindar of Thebes,
best known for his magnificent odes in honor of victors at the Olympic
Games and other competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre
of modern lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by
choruses of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further to show that they
were also site-specific: as the dancers moved through the space of a
city or a sanctuary, their song would refer to local monuments and
landmarks. Part of Pindar's brief, they argue, was to weave words and
bodies into elaborate tapestries of myth and geography and, in so doing,
to re-imagine the very fabric of the city-state. Pindar's poems, in
short, were tools for making sense of space.
Recent scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology.
But Neer and Kurke show that these distinctions are artificial. Poems,
statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and
buildings worked together as a "suite" of technologies for organizing
landscapes, cityscapes, and territories. Studying these technologies in
tandem reveals the procedures and criteria by which the Greeks
understood relations of nearness and distance, "here" and "there"--and
how these ways of inhabiting space were essentially political.
Rooted in close readings of individual poems, buildings, and works of
art, Pindar, Song, and Space ranges from Athens to Libya, Sicily to
Rhodes, to provide a revelatory new understanding of the world the
Greeks built--and a new model for studying the ancient world.
