Epinikion, Kudos, and Criticism

This chapter considers the genre of professional epinikion (choral poems composed on commission to celebrate athletic victories), inquiring into the socio-cultural motivations for the development of this strange hybrid genre c.550 bce and relating it to a broader set of practices commemorating athletic victory in ancient Greece (including victor statues). Epinikion in performance and victor statues alike served as sites for negotiation between pre-eminent individual victors and their broader communities—both the Panhellenic elite and their civic communities. Both poetry and material monuments aimed to distil and preserve the special talismanic power (kudos) the victor acquired by victory at the ‘crown games’, anchoring it and sharing it out with the victor’s family and city. At the same time, literary evidence suggests that this elitist valorization of epinikian praise, victory statues, crowns, and kudos was not uncontested in archaic and classical Greece: poets espousing civic values explicitly challenged the worth of athletic achievement as a common good.