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Title: The Odes: And Selected Fragments by Pindar, Richard Stoneman ISBN: 0-460-87674-0 Publisher: Everymans Library Pub. Date: 01 March, 1998 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $11.95

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Summary: Ian Myles Slater on An Exemplary Edition
Comment: The main text of this book is G.S. Conway's 1972 translation of the "Odes." Richard Stoneman has added an introduction presenting modern critical views, redone the headnotes and extensive notes to each of the poems, and added a selection of Fragments (some quite extensive) in translation. With these additions, the volume surpasses in general usefulness Frank Nisetich's translation of the Odes ("Victory Odes," 1980), and the older translations by C.M. Bowra ("Odes," 1969, a Penguin Classic, apparently currently back in print), and Richmond Lattimore's "Odes" (originally 1947, available in a second edition of 1976). Whether it surpasses them in accuracy may be left to classical scholars; the question of readability lies with the individual reader. (There is also a two-volume bilingual edition in the Loeb Classical Library, edited and translated by W.H. Race, which includes even the smallest fragments.)

Pindar (about 518-438 BC) was regarded as outstanding poet by the Greeks and Romans, and four books of his collected poems survive intact (for all practical purposes). As it happens, these are songs composed for celebrations in honor of victors in the major Games of ancient Greece (Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian), and are centered on athletes and wealthy patrons (owners of horses and chariot teams). Even the athletes normally belonged to aristocratic families, which could provide them with the time and coaching to train effectively.

This may seem to narrow the scope of the songs, but protocol demanded attention to the gods and heroes of the victor's city or family, or some god or hero who could in some way be appropriately invoked as a comparison. As a result, the Epinician (Victory) Odes are a rich source of divine and heroic mythology -- when it can be teased out of Pindar's rich and frustratingly allusive verses.

Stoneman's commentary, based on current scholarship, attempts to clear away dead wood in the scholarly tradition dating back at least to Hellenistic times, and treat the poems as literature, not political columns or personal confessions. In the process, he manages to make clear the intensely aristocratic milieu in which Pindar worked, even as Athenian democracy was rising around him.