Hesiod and Pindar

This chapter examines Hesiodic elements in Pindar’s “First Hymn” and Pythian 1 and appropriations of Hesiod’s “path to virtue” in the epinicians. Differences between Pindar’s treatment of Zeus’s marriage and cosmic dispensations in the “First Hymn” and Hesiod’s account articulate a greater emphasis on cosmic order and create an identification between the audience’s response to the poem and that of the gods to the newly created cosmos. In Pythian 1 Pindar’s ekphrasis of Etna presents a picture of Typhon who is more constrained and integrated into the cosmic order than his counterpart in the Theogony. But Pindar represents the monster with great imagistic and musical immediacy and brings it into closer proximity to human civilization. These tensions can be read as programmatic for the poem’s projection of the listener as an ethical subject, articulating the threats posed to human self-constitution by the violence in both the natural and social orders.