The Political Position of Poets in the Polis: An Interpretation of Pindar's Eighth Pythian

Abstract

Abstract: As the greatest lyric poet in ancient Greece, Pindar achieved the peak of the Greek traditional choral poems through his beauteous odes and his teaching about aristocratic moral teaching. This paper takes the use of the first person, a conventional technique in his odes, as the starting point to approach the odes. T he paper tries to analyze the poet's political position in the polis (city) through a detailed reading of Lines 60-80 of Pindar's "Eighth Pythian Ode." In this section, the first person and the second person are employed in the pray to Apollo, the claim for the harmonious character of the poetry in a polis, and the appeal for poetic teaching to the aristocrats. The paper argues that the use of different persons in the poem constitutes a measured political order, while the poet and his odes composed under gods’ justice take the centre of this order .

Key words: ode, the first person, gods, poets, harmony, teaching

Lou Lin. The Political Position of Poets in the Polis: An Interpretation of Pindar's Eighth Pythian[J]. Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2013, 33(2): 33-40.

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