Pindar, Hesiod, and the Charites of Orchomenos (Olympian 14)

Abstract

Abstract:This essay offers a new reading of Olympian 14 as a civic or sacral commission for choral staging at the shrine of the Charites in Orchomenos. It is analyzed as a movement from prayerful hymn, indirectly seeking the Charites’ festive acceptance and blessings (1–12), through the accompanying komos’s overtly epinician presentation of the victor Asopichos to the goddesses (13–20), to a concluding apostrophe mandating Echo to replicate the Olympic victory proclamation and crowning for the victor’s father in the underworld (20–24). Particular attention is paid to dramatic effects within Pindar’s local re-enactment of Olympic victory-ritual. Shifting speaker-perspectives are traced as the three-stage drama of hymnic appeal, komos arrival/acceptance, and the mandated Echo’s katabasis unfolds. Pindar’s treatment of the Charites is analyzed both as an extension of lyric Muse-conventions and as a re-working of Hesiod’s references to both groups. The essay concludes with an assessment of the civic-sacral implications of Hesiod’s presence within the text, in relation to the belief that his re-interred bones lay close to the performance-site at Orchomenos.