Script and Song in Pindar and Aeschylus

Abstract

This dissertation, "Script and Song in Pindar and Aeschylus", begins from the simple fact, often obscured by political and social distinctions, that Pindar and Aeschylus were poetic contemporaries and found success with the same audiences across the Greek Mediterranean. I argue that they also shared a poetic outlook which reflected large-scale shifts in the conceptualization of poetry during their historical period. This perspective stems from their awareness of a written poetic tradition that was by then several centuries old, and which produced a corresponding concern for the future material longevity and reperformability of poetic objects. In particular, new realities of reperformance required a substantial reexamination and redefinition of the temporal conception of poetic voice to fully integrate the ever more decisive role of writing in facilitating poetic performances. I argue that Pindar and Aeschylus responded to their changing poetic reality by developing a scriptory poetics that allowed them to adjust their compositional style to reflect and reveal their poetry as fixed in writing, thus inhabiting a temporality shaped by the physical text as well as the presence of an author or an audience.