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Pindar's Homer — The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past
Pindar’s Homer
Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (1990) extends the argument of Best of the Achaeans from epic into lyric. Where the 1979 book reconstructed the Panhellenic evolution of the heroic epic, Pindar’s Homer shows how archaic lyric — Pindar’s epinician odes above all — inherits and transforms the medium of kleos by applying it to living victors.
For Nagy, Pindar’s praise-poetry is not a departure from Homer but a continuation by other means. The kleos that the Iliad confers on the dead Achilles, Pindar confers on the living athlete; the epinician makes of the Olympic victor a hero in the technical archaic sense, and inserts him into the same traditional medium that bound gods and heroes to the Muses’ song. The “lyric possession of an epic past” is the historical process by which the Panhellenic inheritance survived the death of the long epic form.
This work is flagged as a library silence in recon-79 — it was not retrieved, and the account above rests on Nagy’s own cross-references from Best of the Achaeans to the later monograph. A future recon should seat this title in the Oracle corpus directly.