"Dream of a Shade": Refractions of Epic Vision in Pindar's "Pythian 8" and Aeschylus' "Seven against Thebes"

Abstract

T HIS essay explores the idea of epic in relative rather than absolute terms, with specific reference to the image of a "dream of a shade" in Pindar's Pythian 8 and Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes.' In both form and content, these two poetic creations contain features that may be described as epic in nature. The main argument of this essay is that such features, as refracted separately in the two distinct genres of tragedy and victory ode or "epinician," are in fact complementary in revealing a unified picture of epic as a genre in its own right.2 The problem is, we cannot even begin to piece together such a picture without a clarification of the idea of epic as a genre. So I offer this premise: that the genre of epic, as well as any other genre, cannot be defined absolutely, as if it belonged to Plato's world of Forms (in the usage of Plato, the very idea of "Form" is expressed by the same word that means "genre": eidos).3 Rather, genre needs to be defined both