Pindar’s epinikia, or victory odes, commissioned to celebrate athletic victors at the periodic panhellenic games, challenge their original audiences to play the role of what we may call “savvy interpreters” of these stylistically and compositionally complex choral praise poems. By using the tools provided by the framework of Cognitive Sciences, I shall try to show that the architecture of Pindar’s epinicians invite such an approach, and that they are, in fact, designed to elicit a visual, rather than syntactical, parsing of the odes’ content in the audience. On the contrary, what I shall be proposing is that we move from a textual unity to a gestalt unity approach, which, as I shall try to show, is more akin to the dynamics of grasping the odes contents in the context of an oral delivery. Since I understand Pindar’s epinicians to be the entextualized script of an oral performance, I shall claim that the tools of traditional textual criticism will usually fall short of grasping the very unity after which they strive by forcing the odes to comply to a "centripetal" notion of unity (Heath, 1986). The problem of unity has plagued Pindaric criticism for generations and, although it has been a driving force in advancing the understanding of many aspects of the odes, it has also contributed to an excessive rationalization of its poetry by means of logical analysis that are inextricably bound to the literary form of the epinicians.
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