How Pindar’s Homer Might Save From Harm the Heroic Glory of Ajax

Abstract

In this essay I attempt to explain, though only in its barest outlines, Pindar’s poetic project of picturing ‘Homer’ as a potential savior of the glory deserved by Ajax, hero of Salamis—despite this Homer’s generally indiscriminate taste, it is claimed, for greedily savoring all the delicacies of all the myths cooked up for him by way of epic poetry—I use the word ‘myths’ here only for the moment in rendering the original Greek word, mûthoi. For Pindar, as a master of lyric song in the earlier part of the fifth century BCE, the mûthoi of epic poetry are harmful because of their inherent relativism—a relativism that results, supposedly, from uncritical and indiscriminate inclusions of localized variations in epic storytelling. Such variations, which tend to contradict each other in content, are blamed on a ‘Homer’ who is imagined in Pindar’s songs as a prototypical master poet of all epic poetry. In terms of Pindar’s songs, the relativism of mûthoi in the epic poetry of this proto-poet Homer threatens to shade over the unified alḗtheia or absolute ‘truth’ of heroic glory as supposedly illuminated in Pindar’s own lyric songs. It is in the light of such a selective lyric program that Pindar’s songs focus on the desperate feelings of Ajax in that agonizing moment when this hero’s own fellow Achaeans awarded the arms of the fallen super-hero Achilles, the best of the Achaeans, to Odysseus and not to Ajax. Reacting to the indignity that he has just suffered, Ajax expresses his cosmic desperation by committing suicide. He skewers himself on a sword that he had received as a gift, once upon a time, from his admiring martial opponent Hector. This suicide of Ajax is blamed in Pindar’s songs on shameless distortions of truth—yes, distortions made possible by way of Homer’s shamelessly indiscriminate inclusions of all too many tasty epic variations that this prototypical poet of epic, as pictured in Pindar’s lyric song, was savoring all too greedily. And yet, despite such a negative picturing of epic repertoire, it is also claimed in Pindar’s song that the despair of Ajax might be mitigated, that there might still be hope, genuine hope, for saving the heroic glory deserved by Ajax. Such a hoped-for salvation might still be achieved, it is claimed, by way of judicious selectivity in rethinking Homer’s menu, as it were, and even in a rethinking of Homer himself. Pindar’s Homer, as represented in his own lyric song, thus becomes an improved Homer who must be more discriminating, more selective, in viewing the heroes of the epic past.