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.
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