The Politics of Identity in Greek Sicily and Southern Italy

This book offers the first sustained analysis of the politics of collective identity in Greek Sicily and southern Italy during the period c. 600–200 BCE. It advances two main arguments. First, the western Greeks constructed multiple identities, including a separate polis identity for each city-state, sub-Hellenic ethnicities such as Dorian and Ionian, regional identities, and an overarching sense of Greekness. The book untangles the many overlapping strands of these plural identities and analyzes how they relate to one another. Second, the book presents a compelling new account of the role of identity in Greek politics. Identity was often created through conflict and was reshaped as political conditions changed, it created legitimacy for kings and tyrants, and it contributed to the decision-making processes of poleis. A series of detailed case studies explores these points by drawing on a wide variety of source material, including historiography, epinician poetry, coinage, inscriptions, religious practices, and material culture. The wide-ranging analysis covers both Sicily and southern Italy, encompassing cities such as Syracuse, Camarina, Croton, and Metapontion; ethnic groups such as the Dorians and Achaeans; and tyrants and politicians from the Deinomenids to Hermocrates to Pyrrhus and Hieron II. Spanning the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, this study is an essential contribution to the history, societies, cultures, and identities of the Greek West.

Intertextuality in Early Greek Poetry: The Special Case of Epinician

This paper offers a reappraisal of the role of intertextuality in fifth-century BCE epinician poetry by means of a comparison with the role of intertextuality in all of early Greek hexameter poetry, ‘lyric epic’, and fifth-century BCE tragedy and comedy. By considering the ways in which performance culture as well as the production of written texts affects the prospects for intertextuality, it challenges a scholarly view that would straightforwardly correlate intertextuality in early Greek poetry with an increasing use and dissemination of written texts. Rather, ‘performance rivalry’ (a term understood to encompass both intra- and intergeneric competition between poetic works that were performed either on the same occasion or on closely related occasions) is identified as a plausible catalyst of intertextuality in all of the poetic genres considered, from the eighth or seventh century to the fifth century BCE. It is argued that fifth-century epinician poetry displays frequent, fine-grained, and allusive intertextuality with a range of early hexameter poetry: the Iliad, the poems of the Epic Cycle, and various ‘Hesiodic’ poems – poetry that in all probability featured in the sixth-fifth century BCE rhapsodic repertoire. It is also argued that, contrary to what is maintained in some recent Pindaric scholarship, there is no comparable case to be made for a frequent, significant, and allusive intrageneric intertextuality between epinician poems: in this respect, the case of epinician makes a very striking contrast with epic, tragedy, and comedy – poetic genres to which intrageneric intertextuality was absolutely fundamental. It is suggested that the presence or absence of intrageneric intertextuality in the genres in question is likely to be associated with the presence or absence of performance rivalry. A further factor identified as having the potential to inhibit intrageneric intertextuality in epinician is the undesirability of having one poem appear to be ‘bettered’ by another in a genre were all poems were commissioned to exalt individual patrons. This, again, is a situation that did not arise for epic, tragedy, or comedy, where a kind of competitive or ‘zero-sum’ intertextuality could be (and was) unproblematically embraced. Intertextuality in epinician thus appears to present a special case vis-à-vis the other major poetic genres of early Greece, whose workings can both be illuminated by consideration of the workings of intertextuality in epic, tragedy, and comedy, and can in turn illuminate something of the workings of intertextuality in those genres.

ON THE MIRROR OF TYRANTS: XENOPHON’S HIERO AND ITS CONTEXT(S)

This article argues that in the Hiero, Xenophon skilfully combines elements of wisdom literature, epinician poetry, the Mirror of Tyrants and logoi Sōkratikoi. In doing so, he pursues two objectives. One is to link his reflections on leadership to respected and influential traditions in order to give his views additional weight and render them interesting for a wider audience. The second objective is to respond to Plato’s challenge to the traditional way of doing politics and, more specifically, the view that it is irremediable. For these reasons, this paper attempts to reconstruct the influence of wisdom literature (hypothēkai, Seven Sages), the Mirror of Tyrants (Isocrates), epinician poetry (Simonides, Pindar) and Plato’s dialogues on the Hiero.

Demeter and Persephone

Chapter 2 concentrates on representations of Demeter and Persephone in the Syracusan odes. The goddesses are important for two reasons. First, the Deinomenids were ancestral priests of Demeter and Persephone in Sicily and the goddesses therefore could easily be linked to the rule of this family of tyrants. On the other hand, worship of the two goddesses was widespread throughout Sicily. This chapter argues that references to Demeter and Persephone in epinician poetry for Hieron and members of his circle promote and celebrate Syracusan and Deinomenid expansion throughout the island of Sicily by aligning pan-Sicilian and Deinomenid interests and rooting them in the island’s landscape. The first section surveys the material remains for the goddesses in Sicily before exploring discussions of the goddesses in mythological, historical, and literary sources. An analysis of Pindar’s Nemean 1 then proposes that, while the link between Arethusa and Alpheos represents the close tie between Syracuse and the Panhellenic sanctuary at Olympia, Pindar’s references to Demeter and Persephone in epinician poetry define the relationship between Syracuse and the rest of Sicily under the rule of the Deinomenid tyrants. A final section argues that in contrast to the goddesses who celebrate uniquely Syracusan and Deinomenid interests, the hero Herakles articulates a role for Syracuse and the West more generally in the maintenance of the order of the Olympians.

Introduction

The introduction presents the central questions and motivations of the book: How are the mythical narratives in poems for Sicilian Greek victors different from the mythical narratives in the remainder of Pindaric epinician poetry? If the Sicilian odes lack local myths, as has sometimes been argued, how does epinician poetry shape and reinforce identity in celebrations of victors from newly colonized cities? How are conventional elements of epinician poetry activated to signify more than formal aspects of genre? The chapter begins by briefly surveying mythical narratives in the odes for Aegina, Cyrene, and Thebes as points of comparison. It next defines the term “locality” as it is used throughout the study to refer to aspects that are unique to a city, by situating a conception of locality within current scholarly discussions of the notions of place and space in the fields of geography, philosophy, and Classics. After surveying previous studies of place in epinician poetry, the introduction concludes by proposing that while all of Pindar’s epinician odes delineate and redefine places, the Sicilian odes present unique strategies for the expression of identity through choral poetry because of the mixed populations and constant political and civic upheaval that took place in Sicily during the first half of the fifth century.

From Resolving Stasis to Ruling Sicily: A Reading of Herodotus 7.153-167 in an Epinician Context

When the Greek embassy visits Sicily to convince Gelon to support their cause against the Persian threat, Herodotus begins the Sicilian logos with the story of a man named Telines, an ancestor of the Deinomenid tyrants, Gelon and Hieron. This paper first argues that by resolving the stasis in Gela and securing the civic priesthood of the chthonic goddesses for his descendants Telines prefigures Gelon’s rise to power as tyrant in Sicily. Next, it demonstrates that kingship and the priesthood of Demeter and Persephone are closely linked in Deinomenid ideology in epinician poetry, which provides a crucial backdrop for Herodotus’ portrayal of Gelon. Finally, the paper examines subtle references to the cult of Demeter and Persephone in Herodotus’ account and proposes that Herodotus’ descriptions of the Deinomenids offer a cautionary tale in support of practices that uphold the boundaries between inherited priesthoods and political power in fifth-century Athens.