Mixed praise sexual imagery, truth and discord in Pindar\u27s Odes

Pindar\u27s Odes are not simple expressions of praise, but complex utterances which exhibit a variety of conflicting attitudes towards their subject, the victor. This can be clearly seen from an investigation of the sexual imagery in the Odes, which reveals three particular attitudes towards the victor. These attitudes are praise (the dominant attitude), fear, and laughter, and they are expressed through the images of the victor as a bridegroom, a rapist or adulterer, and a cuckold. This strategy of representing the victor in many guises also appears in the use of ambiguities and revisions to create conflicting accounts of the hero in the mythical narratives in the Odes. Such multiple representations of an individual derive from a conception of identity as plural, and a conception of the true account as that account constituted by a multiplicity of narratives, rather than by the endorsement of a single one. But the Odes also validate the more simple model of truth, often characterized in legal terms, which locates truth in a single privileged account. (As a purveyor of these two types of account the poet, like the victor, has a plural identity, expressed in sexual images.) The Odes thus provide a straight eulogistic account of the victor as well as a conflicting and fragmented account which mixes fear and laughter with the praise. The dialectic between these two accounts is a direct response to the circumstance of commissioned praise; for, in order to increase the authority of the poet, and thus the value of his praise, the patron sanctions the poet\u27s strategy of questioning both the praiseworthiness of his patron and even the very possibility of true praise. Pindaric eulogy is thus revealed as a complex product with a unity of purpose rather than thought, which generates (and thus controls) opposition to itself in order to increase its own worth