Wealth and ethics in Pindar

This dissertation examines wealth alongside other ethical values in Pindar’s epinicians, using an approach developed with the anthropology of ethics and in critical dialogue with socioeconomic historicism. It aims to restore the place of divinity in Pindar’s valuation of wealth and provide a productive framework for interpreting apparent inconsistencies in Pindar’s gnomic wisdom. The methodology incorporates the situated ethics of personal interaction and the poet’s authoritative claims to find the distinctive intervention of individual odes into discourse on ethics. In each chapter’s case study, wealth is found to establish different ethical opportunities and challenges. Chapter 1 couches the claim that ‘man is money’ within the themes of love and loss that run throughout Isthmian 2. In Chapter 2, I argue that the eschatology of Olympian 2 is framed as ethical inheritance and compared to inheriting from the dead, which raises questions about what sort of wealth can cross the boundary of death. Chapter 3 shows how the power of wealth in the context of the colony of Cyrene is enhanced by cooperation in Pythian 5. In Chapter 4, the ethical challenge posed by wealth as a divine benefaction finds its origin in the myth of Ixion in Pythian 2. In each study, the embodied orientation of normativity is identified through close readings of interactions of characters and the relationship between values in gnomic wisdom. This offers a new approach to values in Pindar that accounts for the diverse ways in which wealth is involved in interpersonal and religious ethics.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Roe, Timothy

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gagné, Renaud

• ancient Greek literature
• Lyric
• Anthropology of ethics
• epinician
• praise

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/3c252946-8986-47b4-82c5-45fae535d838/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0009-0002-2638-3874

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/392286