The Disappearance of Melampous in Bacchylides’ Ode 11

Chapter 4 reads Bacchylides’s Ode 11 as a specific example of the ideological suppression of the seer in colonial discourse. In his rendition of the myth of the Proitids, Bacchylides deliberately omits the seer Melampous and, at the same time, casts Proitos’s arrival in Tiryns as a foundation, with Proitos himself as its oikist. The chapter concludes with a connection between this strategy within the ode and its tantalizing historical context. The ode appears to be part of the family of the victor’s larger effort to resist a virtual refoundation of their city by a seer-like figure.