The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy

Pindar's epinikia were poems commissioned to celebrate athletic victories in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Drawing on the insights of interpretive anthropology and cultural history, Leslie Kurke examines the odes as public performances which enact the reintegration of the athletic victor into his heterogeneous communities. Kurke considers in particular the different modes of exchange in which Pindar's poetry participated: the symbolic economy of the household, gift exchange between aristocratic houses, and the workings of monetary exchange within the city.