The speaker of Pindar's
epinician poems (1) is well known for esteeming piety and religious reverence.
In part 1, the author provides, consequently, chapters on archaic "media of memory" such as
epinician (victory poems) and lyric verse (Pindar and Simonides), tragic drama (Aeschylus' Persians), and epideictic and deliberative oratory (here Lysias' funeral oration and Andocides' On Peace).
Pindar's verbal art; an ethnographic study of
epinician style.
And victories vary: not having the requisite athletic contests, the Renaissance freely adapted
epinician to metaphorical victories, like the Nativity, but further to politics or music or abstract thought.
67-68 make it clear that he, not the boy's father Phrikias, was the one who commissioned the
epinician. For a more detailed exposition of this passage and its significance, see my remarks in Hubbard, "Implied Wishes" 41-45.
According to Carnes, Virgil's use of the genre of
epinician briefly introduces new voices into the poem, opening the text up to heteroglossia --" in Bakhtinian terms, the
epinician novelizes the Aeneid" (107).
Writing while the war still raged, four years after Ginsberg's Mantra declared its end, Sanders too could do little more than to sing an
epinician to the heroes of the Peace-swarm in order "briefly ...