3 VICTORY WITHOUT DEFEAT?
CARNIVAL LAUGHTER AND
ITS APPROPRIATION IN
PINDAR'S VICTORY ODES

Nigel Nicholson

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Bakhtin locates Gargantua and Pantagruel at a rare intersection between the radical laughter of folk culture and the sphere of great literature and high ideology (RW, 71–73, 96–101). In Renaissance literature medieval laughter was transformed: “Its wide, popular character, its radicalism and freedom, soberness and materiality were transferred from an almost elemental condition to a state of artistic awareness and purposefulness. In other words, medieval laughter became at the Renaissance stage of its development the expression of a new free and critical historical consciousness” (RW, 73). That is, laughter was included in new art forms and consequently acquired a particular sense of history as Europe emerged from the tyranny of feudalism. Having previously been excluded from the higher forms of literature, laughter was now given a place within those forms; and, once it was included within those forms, laughter found itself supporting the ruling ideology. As Bakhtin says, medieval laughter provided the literary forms which “uncrowned and renewed the established power and official truth” (RW, 99).

Bakhtin, then, seems to use Gargantua and Pantagruel as an example of the appropriation by official ideology of unofficial, folk discourse. But the political aspect of carnivalesque literature is easily forgotten in the rest of Bakhtin's writing, partly because he seeks to present Rabelais as unique, and partly because he is more interested in the symbolic code of carnival, the various images which reflect its meaning (see Rubino 1993). Consequently Bakhtin often ignores the political role that the carnival assumes in high literature. Thus he avoids the subject of political manipulation in his brief treatment of Attic drama, preferring to see the combination of tragedy and satyr play as evidence of the lack of a sharp distinction between official and folk culture in antiquity, rather than of the appropriation by the state of popular discursive forms (RW, 120). Even more striking is Bakhtin's exclusion of Aristophanes' comedies from his history of the novel (the comedies are mentioned once in the main text of Rabelais and His World, and once in a quotation in a note: RW, 92, 434), a move which can only be explained by concerns over the overt political role that the carnival plays in Old Comedy (see Platter 1993 and in the present volume; also Rosier 1986, 27–30). Bakhtin thus leaves us confused as to the politics of the carnival's appearance in high literature, yet politics is one of the central questions that confront readers of Bakhtin's work on the carnival. Is Bakhtin's carnival, then, constructive or destructive of high literature, a Dionysian invasion, or an Apollonian, controlled eruption of disorder, as some Russian readers suggest (see Emerson 1993)?

In this article I argue that this question is not well posed, since it implies that the constructive and destructive visions of the carnival are incompatible. In the complex interrelationship of carnival laughter and high literature the distinction between order and disorder becomes blurred, as the official and the unofficial switch places. For although order and disorder are opposed, high literature actually fosters the disorder of carnival laughter in the hope that that laughter will support the order of the ruling classes. It turns out, in fact, that the monologic discourse of such literature draws its authority from including the dialogism of folk culture, and so encourages this resistance to itself.

To investigate this interdependence I will use the victory Odes of Pindar. Like Gargantua and Pantagruel, these works are situated at the intersection of official and folk culture, of solemn seriousness and laughter, but their tone is strikingly different. Bakhtin calls Gargantua and Pantagruel “the supreme form of laughter” (RW, 97), but when he refers to Pindar, he does so only in order to argue that the Odes belong with the genre of epic in their validation of the past and distance from the openness of contemporary reality (carnival). What reality does enter in (the victor and his victory) is already greatly removed from this contemporary reality, and is then absorbed by the past in order to give it greater value (EN, 13–18). But the notion of absorption here must be examined. Bakhtin himself offers two rather different models for the participation of contemporary reality in high literature when he approaches the question through the metaphor of reduced laughter. On the one hand, the universal and ambivalent laughter of carnival can be restricted in its application, stripped of its regenerative aspects and reduced to barren mockery, as it is in the literature of the Enlightenment (RW, 118–121). On the other hand, carnival laughter can be reduced in volume only, and continue to leave authentic traces in the structures and images of the work, as it does in the Platonic dialogue, in the figure of the ugly-yet-beautiful Socrates and in its typical lack of conclusion (PDP, 164–165). The relation of carnival or contemporary reality to the ideology transmitted in high literature is thus one that needs further investigation; and to pursue this investigation, we can ask what sort of reduced laughter is present in the Odes, that of the Enlightenment or that of the Platonic dialogue. But, as we shall see, the separation of these two types of reduced laughter, like that of Apollonian form and Dionysian disorder, is artificial; the presence of one type of reduced laughter implies the presence of the other.

To those who know Pindar, it may seem strange to find him envisaged with one foot in folk culture. One's first impression of the Odes is of their oppressive seriousness and rigid formalization. They follow strict rhetorical sequences, observe some of the most rigorous metrical structures found in Greek poetry, and maintain careful control over their linguistic and thematic content. Moreover, their role in supporting the dominant classes is obvious: the Odes were commissioned by various ruling families in the Greek city states of the first half of the fifth century to celebrate their achievements in athletics, and, since prowess in athletics was closely identified with prowess in politics, each ode's relevance reached far beyond the playing field. Specific political achievements, for example, in war, cult practice or building projects, often displace the athletic feats within the text. Less specifically, the Odes support these aristocratic families, the remnants of an older, more feudal society under increasing threat from the new forms of government developed in the city state, by celebrating the authority of the aristocracy in the polis and identifying the interests of the city with those of its ruling families (Kurke 1991; Miller 1994, 85).

But the connections of the victory ode to carnival are in fact much more immediate than those of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The victory ode was part of a large carnival-like celebration which Pindar calls the komos (Nagy 1979, 243–252; Kurke 1991, 100–101; Miller 1994, 27–28; the word komos is cognate with the word encomium, which Pindar often uses to refer to his Odes). Little is known about such celebrations, but they almost certainly involved a procession, at some times more formal than at others, with garlands, songs and dancing, and they may even have featured masks and mummers. When we turn to the Odes themselves we certainly find evidence of such a festive context in the many carnival images that appear there: the threshold (e.g., Nee. 1.19, 41, 9.1–3); the fairground wheel (Pyy. 2.21–23, 40–41, 4.213–217); and strange animals such as the wryneck (Py. 4.213–217, Ne. 4.35), the monkey (Pyy. 2.72–73), and the “womb-” or “hog-fish” (the dolphin, Pyy. 2.51, 4.17, Ne. 6.64, Is. 9.7). Moreover, Pindar himself locates the victory ode in a carnivalesque tradition. The komos was the occasion not only for praise poetry such as epinician, but also for abuse poetry, and at the beginning of one ode, Olympian 9, Pindar draws on this shared context when he attributes a primitive celebration of an Olympic victory to Archilochus, the grandfather of iambic abuse poetry (Ol. 9.1–10; see further the scholia to Ol. 9.1–3, and Archilochus fr. 324 West).¹ On one level Archilochus' crude hymn certainly serves as a foil for Pindar's sophisticated composition, but on another Archilochus is cast as the founding father of the genre of the victory ode, and thus the ode is unexpectedly given a comic lineage. This Archilochean hymn is not used by Pindar alone: it reappears in Aristophanes' celebrations of his comic heroes, thus guaranteeing its comic heritage (Birds 1764, Knights 1254, Achamians 1227–1234).² A high-genre, yet comic Pindar: the paradox is perhaps best caught in the dialect of the Odes, a literary Doric. For this is the dialect both of religious hymns and dirges, and of the mimes of Sophron, Herodas and Theocritus, works which Bakhtin numbers among the authentic classical predecessors of the novel (EN, 21–22).

In 1984 John and Frances Newman used these and other observations to argue that the carnival was an important and overlooked influence on Pindar's poetics (Newman and Newman 1984). They were particularly interested in the mechanics of meaning in the Odes, and saw in the twins and masks of carnival the impetus for each ode's way of expressing meaning through recurrent words and images and through the mirroring of reality in myth. This is a valid insight, but it came to dominate their work, generating catalogues of recurring words and unconvincing attempts to establish patterns based on numerical sequences, and it left no room for a consideration of the political nature of the carnival's participation in the discourse of the Odes and in the institution of a commissioned celebration of an athletic victory. Consequently their work was limited, and, together with the notion of using Bakhtin to read Pindar, was generally dismissed by critics (see the reviews by Heath 1985; Instone 1985; and Lefkowitz 1986). Nevertheless, the Newmans were right to stress the carnival context of the victory ode (cf. Farenga 1977, 31 and Cole 1992, 11–32), and their emphasis on this context raises an interesting question for the study of both Pindar and Bakhtin: if indeed carnival does participate in Pindar's Odes, what is the nature of this participation? In this article I will argue, through readings of Nemeans 1 and 7, that the inclusion of carnival in the Odes serves simultaneously to contain any disruption of official ideology and to undermine that containment. The relation of carnival laughter to the high literature of Pindar is therefore ambiguous: the laughter both supports and threatens the ideology of Pindar's patrons.

Let us turn first to Nemean 1. This ode celebrates the victory of Chromius of Etna in the horse race at the Nemean games some time in the mid-to-late 470s, but the ode is concerned more with colonization than athletics (as is often the case: cf. Dougherty 1993, 83–102). Chromius had been put in charge of the newly-founded Etna by Hieron, the tyrant of Syracuse. Hieron, Chromius' brother-in-law, and had become, after the Syracusan victories over the Etruscans and Carthaginians, the single most powerful individual in the Mediterranean. The foundation of Etna was not without its problems — the populations of two towns, Catana and Naxos, were displaced in order to make room for it (Diodorus Siculus 11.49) — and it is this appropriation by Chromius and his fellow settlers of the land on which Etna was founded that Pindar is concerned to justify in the opening triad of Nemean 1:

 

The first point to note from this dense passage is that Etna is mentioned in line 6. The simple naming of Etna serves to mark the new city as stable and prestigious; Etna is made the equal of the other cities that supply victors in the various major equestrian competitions — Syracuse, Acragas, etc. — and its recent problematic foundation is forgotten. In naming Etna, the ode repeats (though for a smaller audience) the act of advertisement that has already happened at the site of the games themselves: the victor in each event was announced to the cosmopolitan crowd, along with his patronym and hometown (cf. Nash 1990). By choosing to be Chromius of Etna, the victor has proclaimed the success of Etna as well as of himself.

A second, more complex strategy of justification is evident in the opening lines: Chromius' victory at Nemea is inteipreted by Pindar as a sign that the gods favored the foundation of Etna. This idea is communicated indirectly through a three-way comparison between Chromius' equestrian victory, Pindar's composition of the ode, and the third unnamed term, the foundation of Etna. The two named terms are both foundations: Pindar speaks of the “foundations” of the ode in line 5, and, since Nemea was the least of the four major athletic festivals, a Nemean victory was regularly thought of as a foundation for further successes (cf. Ne. 2.1–5). Moreover, both these foundations are sanctioned by the gods: Pindar's ode by Ortygia, Chromius' victory by Zeus. A pattern of divinely-sanctioned foundations thus emerges, and when the two metaphorical foundations are drawn together in the general statement of line 8 (“the foundations are laid with the help of the gods”), the third foundation, that of Etna, is obviously also included (cf. Rose 1974, 166). Through a process of association, Pindar has used Chromius' racing victory to prove that Etna's foundations are blessed.

Pindar turns next to the mythology of Sicily to justify Hieron's use of force to occupy the site of Etna. Sicily, he says, was once the wedding gift of Zeus to Persephone (that a wedding is described here is clear from the Hellenistic editors; see Drachmann 1927, 13); and along with the island, Zeus gave her a people successful in war and athletics. The implication is again clear: Sicily (Pindar's sights are no longer restricted to Etna) rightfully belongs to a people of military and athletic success — that is, the Syracusans. The erasures and slippages in this section repay close examination. First, the whole movement to the mythical past serves to remove the problems concerning the ownership of Etna from contemporary politics. Second, the violence of displacing whole populations is erased as Pindar converts this process into a legal and proper gift at a wedding (cf. Dougherty 1993, 61–80). Third, Pindar manages to pass ownership of the island from the mythical Persephone to the very real people of Syracuse by tagging on an addendum to the usual mythical account of Zeus' gift: Persephone received not only Sicily, but also its people (16–17). Lastly, these lines also blur the boundary between mythical past and contemporary present. The sentence begins “and the son of Cronus gave […]”, but ends describing a contemporary people, a people who have already won Olympic victories. By so adeptly confusing the different times, Pindar lends to the Syracusans' claim the authority of mythology; the detour through myth is not a mere ornament, but an assertion of the natural right of Hieron to displace the people of Catana and Naxos. As Vincent Farenga says of Pythian 4, “the linguistic transformation of myth amounts to no more than the individual appropriation of real estate” (1977, 30: cf. Rose 1982, 55–58).

It is thus clear that Nemean 1 participates in and maintains the official ideology of the Syracusan dynasty of Hieron. The ode propagates a particular version of what is right, and marshals its own metaphors of peaceful and rightful land exchange against the unstated claims of Hieron's opponents. In such an ideological battleground, truth is naturally the poet's most valuable possession, and consequently the epinician poet regularly asserts his truthfulness, presenting himself as either a herald or a witness at a trial; compare especially Bacchylides speaking of Hieron's race-horse: “Touching the earth, I pledge that never yet in competition has the dust from horses ahead of him befouled him as he sped onward to the finishing post” (5.42–45), or Pindar on the Ohgathidae: “I will make clear all their victories at Isthmus and in Nemea with a few words, and a true witness will be at my side, the sweet-tongued cry of the trusty herald, heard sixty times in both places” (Ol. 13.98–100). It does not therefore surprise us when Pindar closes his mythological detour into Sicilian land-division by once again staking his claim to absolute truth: “I have come upon the opportunity for saying many things, laying my foundation without lies” (Ne. 1.18). Such a claim at such a juncture may seem to us heavily ironic — the repeated metaphor of foundation seems to stress that Pindar's truth is as much dependent on Hieron's military strength as Etna itself — but it is important to note how insistent Pindar is in claiming that his version of reality is the single correct version.

Given the need for this competitive notion of truth (that is of truth as belonging to only one account among those offered), the long mythical section in the second part of Nemean 1 is puzzling. The myth tells of the birth of Heracles, but the treatment of this episode is more comic than solemn, as it concentrates first on the moment when Heracles' father Amphitryon discovers that the child of his wife Alcmena is not his biological son, but the son of Zeus, the king of the gods. The baby has only just been born when Zeus' perennially jealous wife Hera sends two snakes after it. The alarm is raised, and Amphitryon rushes in to save the child he had thought his own. What he finds, however, tells him of Heracles' divinity and his own cuckoldry, for the baby has already throttled the snakes. Amphitryon can only stand in the doorway of his wife's chamber and stare:

He stood confused in amazement,

Hard to bear and joyous. For he saw the extraordinary

Spirit and power of

His son. Reversed by the gods

Were the words of the messengers. (Ne. 1.55–59)

In Amphitryon Pindar offers us a perfect carnival symbol. The laughter directed at the cuckold is (in line with the whole genre of the Odes) naturally muffled; there is less of the ringing laughter that surely greeted the frequent comic dramatizations of Amphitryon's fate (for example, in Old Comedy by Plato Comicus and Archippus, and in later comedy by Plautus: see Shero 1956, 195–206), but the significance of the image remains intact and is clearly proclaimed. Amphitryon is here a tigure of mixture and duality, as he stands in amazement both “hard to bear and joyous”. On the one hand, a divine son is a triumph; any son provides insurance against individual mortality, but an immortal son guarantees the glorious survival of the family name. On the other hand, a divine son is a token of humiliation as it marks Amphitryon not only as a mortal but also as a cuckold. Amphitryon's carnival nature is emphasized by the ambiguities of the final sentence from the quoted passage, “Reversed by the gods were the words of the messengers.” What exactly were the words of the messengers? We are not told, but the two most plausible conjectures give very different pictures of Amphitryon. Perhaps the messengers announced the birth, “You have a son”, in which case the reversal is the bitter humiliation of cuckoldry; but perhaps the messengers brought word of the baby's (assumed) death, “The baby is dead”, in which case the reversal is the triumph of continued life. Amphitryon is a transparent symbol of carnival duality: his status is ambivalent (a triumphant father and a humiliated cuckold), his reaction is ambivalent (grief and joy), even his spatial position (in the doorway) is ambivalent.

Bakhtin stresses the importance of the cuckold in the symbolic code of carnival. Cuckoldry is one of the symbols of uncrowning, “the uncrowning of the old husband and a new act of procreation with the young husband” (RW, 241). But the cuckold is not just a symbol of the brevity of mortal victories; it is also a symbol of the more general problems of assigning value and speaking truthfully. Because the cuckold joins opposed states (triumph and humiliation), he renders his own description problematic. Such linguistic quandaries are characteristic of the language games of carnival, as we can see from the various carnival works in which praise and abuse, in direct contradiction of one another, are predicated on the same object. As examples Bakhtin offers the pair of grotesque litanies that Panurge and Friar John direct at each other's (and every other male's) “cod” in Gargantua and Pantagruel, one an exaggerated praise of the cod, the other an extended abuse; or Clement Marot's pair of poems on the female breast, “The Beautiful Breast” and “The Ugly Breast” (RW, 415–432). By producing such contradictory accounts, carnival questions and undermines the values on which judgments of praise and blame are based. Naturally such a confusion of value challenges any simple assignment of praise, as well as the notion of truth on which such assignments depend.

But the carnival laughter in the figure of Amphitryon has been altered in one important way. Compare the story of Hephaestus' cuckoldry which is found in one of Demodocus' songs in the Odyssey. Although Hephaestus (literally) catches his wife in the act of adultery, his situation is joined to Amphitryon's by the close similarity in their reactions: like Amphitryon he stands in the doorway and looks on, and like Amphitryon he feels a mixture of triumph and humiliation as he surveys the sight of his wife caught in her infidelity, a sight he calls “both laughable and unendurable” (Od. 8.307). The similarity in Pindar's presentation of Amphitryon to Homer's presentation of Hephaestus is not, 1 think, fortuitous; for the latter is sung directly after an athletic victory, as if it were a sort of proto-victory ode (Newman and Newman 1984, 63–64).⁴ Odysseus has just been goaded into competing in the Phaeacians' athletic competitions by the rash taunts of the young men, and has proved himself by throwing a heavier discus considerably further than any of the locals could manage. To defuse a potentially nasty situation. Alcinous asks the bard to perform a song, and it is then that Demodocus sings his song of Hephaestus' cuckoldry. Unlike one of Pindar's epinicia, Demodocus' song narrates only mythical events, but it does relate those events to the present, and the particular connection the poet forges between past and present is what interests us here. For the victor is joined to the cuckold when one of the assembled spectators likens the god to a slow runner who has nevertheless defeated his speedier opponents. Odysseus is, of course, the present victor; moreover, he has also just told the Phaeacians that although most of his athletic skills are sound, his running is not as fast as it once was (Od. 8.230–234).

When we look for a similar identification in Pindar's ode, however, we are frustrated. In Nemean 1, the figure from the victory celebration who most corresponds to Amphitryon is the poet himself, who has earlier described himself as standing in the doorway of the victor's house (19; see, e.g., Bury 1890, 5; Newman and Newman 1984, 59). Meanwhile, the victor is most like Heracles, since the latter is described in the prophecy as winning battles on land and sea (as Chromius in Ne. 9.34–37) and enjoying an eternal victory celebration (62–63, 69–72). Moreover, Heracles is somewhat the opposite of a carnival image in this ode, since his victories come without defeats, and since he sloughs off his mortality and becomes self-regenerating. In Pindar's victory ode, therefore, in contrast to Demodocus', the victor seems to be kept separate from the cuckold; the laughter of the ode would therefore seem to be what Bakhtin identifies as the reduced laughter of the Enlightenment. It no longer seems universal, and the cuckold no longer seems to be the negation of every victorious figure.

This phenomenon is one that Bakhtin recognizes and locates at the midpoint of what he describes as the collapse of the plurality of ancient folk speech into the monotone of official ideology:

The ancient dual tone of speech is the stylistic reflection of the ancient dual-bodied image. As the ancient image disintegrated, an interesting phenomenon in the history of literature and spectacle took place: the formation of images in pairs, which represent top and bottom, front and back, life and death. The classic example of such pairs is Don Quixote and Sancho, but similar images are still seen today in circus sideshows and other comic productions. The dialogue of these pairs is of considerable interest, since it marks the as yet incomplete disintegration of the dual tone. (RW, 433–434)

Pindar's transformation of the dialogic figure of the cuckold into two monologic figures thus creates a recognizable carnival image, the unequal pair. According to Bakhtin, the unequal pair retains the original dual tone of the folk carnival, but also implies a move towards the denial of that dual tone. This is the paradoxical moment at which we must locate Pindar's fragmentation of the carnival cuckold. This fragmentation is a strategy for including and managing carnival laughter, and is comparable to the strategy which Pindar uses in his treatment of the foundation of Etna earlier in the ode. Just as Pindar offers an official set of metaphors for articulating the appropriation of land, so he offers an official version of carnival discourse. This is the transformation which Bakhtin suggests the laughter of Gargantua and Pantagruel undergoes: the laughter is brought into high literature, but only in order that its threat to official ideology may be diverted.

This phenomenon of controlled discursive disorder is well attested in both antiquity and the Middle Ages. It can be seen, for example, in the Catholic Church's sponsorship of medieval carnivals, which Bakhtin, reverting to the confusion we outlined earlier, marks as a knee-jerk legalization of such activity, rather than an important part of the whole discursive strategy of the medieval Catholic church (RW, 73–82; cf. Reckford 1987, 384–385). Spartan men were accustomed to mock each other in their communal dining halls, but did not allow the jesting to pass beyond the walls of those messes (Plutarch Lye. 12.4), and most of the invective in iambic poetry, Nagy argues, is directed at friends, rather than enemies, and serves to strengthen the bonds that hold the iambic poet's social group together (1976; 1979, 243–252).

We can also see this dynamic of a “controlled eruption” operating on the margins of Demodocus' “victory ode”, since, being part of a larger narrative, it comes with a full description of its context. The song itself is one of the most daring examples of dialogism in the Odyssey, since it takes two opposed views of Hephaestus' cuckoldry. On the one hand, the narrative condemns adultery (as one of the gods says, “Crime does not pay”, Od. 8.329), but on the other it commends it. For as Hermes and Apollo look on, they quip that they would gladly suffer Ares' present indignity of being caught in the act and much more if they could taste the joys of Aphrodite, and the song ends by inviting the audience to savor her beauty (see Peradotto 1990, 56–58; 1993). Despite the mixed morality of the song, however, there is no hint that it is not fully sanctioned by the king and queen of the court, Alcinous and Arete; in fact, Alcinous is Demodocus' patron. This is all the more striking since Alcinous is probably afraid that the handsome and clever stranger in his palace might seduce his wife (a fear that Hipponax, a sixth-century iambic poet who often models his own behavior on Odysseus', picks up on in a carnivalesque vein, when he takes as his lover a wife whose name is also Arete: see Rosen 1990). In fact, the song seems to verbalize the fears of both patron and victor, since Odysseus is also implicated in the cuckoldry. As we noted earlier, Odysseus is likened to the cuckold when Hephaestus is likened to a victorious (though slow) runner; but it is Odysseus, of all people, who fears this destiny: he has been away from his wife for twenty years, and has been asking when he could about her fidelity (11.177–179). Yet even so, the Odysseus who weeps profusely during Demodocus' other songs (cf. Clay 1983, 101–102) finds no cause to weep at this one (8.367–369); in fact, despite its apparently dangerous dialogism, the song seems finally to reinforce the moral code that prohibits adultery and to bring Odysseus and Alcinous closer together. Because of the similarities between Demodocus' song and Nemean 1, this scene offers a dramatization of the controlled inclusion of carnival laughter in epinician.

Yet the brazenness of the dialogism in the song of Ares and Aphrodite is striking — and indeed it should lead us to re-evaluate the nature of the carnival laughter in Nemean 1. On closer inspection, Chromius' insulation from this laughter does not seem so complete. First, Amphitryon is identified with Chromius by two aspects of the narrative: Amphitryon, like the victor, is a leader of his people (51); moreover, the fact that Amphitryon is the subject of the messengers' announcement in the passage quoted above also identifies him with the victor, since at athletic festivals the victors were announced by heralds (cf. Py. 1.32–33), and Pindar often models his ode on this announcement (see e.g., O1. 9.21–27, Py. 2.1–8, and Nash 1990). Second, we are encouraged from the start of the ode to read Chromius as a poor substitute for a real victor — the real victor is in fact Hieron (cf. Bury 1890, 2–3; Rose 1974, 168–169). While the reference in the opening line to Alpheus, the river which was traditionally thought to flow from Olympia to Syracuse, serves primarily to connect Syracuse with both athletic excellence and its Dorian heritage (cf. Py. 1.60–66), it also suggests that Chromius' Nemean victory is somewhat inadequate (a suggestion underlined by the reference to the Syracusans' Olympic victories in line 17). The date of this ode cannot be fixed, but it may have been performed soon after Hieron won the Olympic victory in the horse-race in 476 celebrated by both Pindar and Bacchylides. If this was the case, blame is clearly fastened on Chromius, and Hieron takes Chromius' place as the human counterpart to Heracles. Moreover, since he was the guardian of the son of the previous ruler of Eastern Sicily, Hieran's brother Gelon, Chromius may seem to fit more naturally into the role of nominal, and not biological, father of the real hero, Hieron-Heracles. It is thus clear that Pindar refuses to transform completely the universality of the carnival laughter introduced through the image of the cuckold.

The pattern whereby an unequal pair of mythological figures seems both to insulate the victor from a connection to carnival laughter and to preserve that connection is repeated in other odes. Olympian 9, for example (the ode which begins with the reference to Archilochus' primitive victory ode) tells the story of Locrus and Opus, the eponymous founders of Opuntian Locri, the hometown of the victor celebrated here. Locrus ends up in a position similar to Amphitryon's: he is old and childless, and so Zeus presents him with an already pregnant wife who will bear him an heir. This heir is Opus, and since Opus becomes the leader of the “city and people” (66) of Opuntian Locri, he is the obvious mythical mirror of the victor whom Pindar calls the “son” of that city (14). But, as that city's glorious son, the victor must also be seen in Locrus, a hero in his own right (62), and the ruler who gave the government of the city to Opus (66). It is, after all, both Locrus and Opus who are remembered as founders in the city's name. Again we find the same pairing of son and cuckold, and the same hierarchy of identification with the victor.

This particular pairing is interesting because it highlights two contrary aspects of Pindar's treatment of the cuckold in the Odes. The first aspect is the effort made to mitigate the duality of the image. Despite having located his ode in the carnivalesque tradition of Archilochus, he proceeds to remove any hint that Locrus' fate contains grief as well as joy. For, far from showing any distress at his own inability to produce his own heir, Locrus is so gladdened that his family will continue that he names the baby after its mother's father (62–64). Instead of confusing the reference of the image of the cuckold, as he did in Nemean 1, Pindar has altered its surface meaning. The second aspect is the effort made to introduce the image. For Pindar seems to have altered the traditional version of Opus' ancestry (in which Locrus is his biological father) to create a cuckold (Nisetich 1980, 122–123). Moreover, the poet makes productive infertility something of a recurrent theme in the history of Locrus' race: he also tells the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha who, after the flood, make their home in Locri and generate a race “without sex”, when the stones they throw out become people (41–46).

A son–cuckold pair can also be seen in Pythian 4, though the cuckold is not obviously present. Pelias, the king of Iolcos, confronts his future successor and the cause of his death, Jason, when Jason arrives in Iolcos for the first time as an adult. Their confrontation is mainly verbal, but it also has a sexual component. Pelias is not his heir's father, and there is a subtle suggestion that Pelias' sexual power is on the wane when Jason arrives in the marketplace of Iolcos wearing a leopard skin and carrying a pair of spears. For this is the equipment of Paris, the seducer of Menelaus' wife (see Segal 1986, 29, 58). Jason, an athlete himself, is the most natural parallel for the victor Arcesilas, ruler of Cyrene, but the unusual commissioning of this ode (by an exile seeking to return to Cyrene, rather than by the victor) casts Arcesilas as Pelias also (cf. Farenga 1977, 9 and Carey 1980).

So what is the nature of laughter in the Odes? We seem to have a mix of both sorts of reduced laughter, to have gestures made both to alter the universal application of the carnival cuckold and to facilitate it. To understand this mixture it will be helpful to draw on the work of Peter Rose on Pythian 10 (1992; 1982). Rose develops the position of Frederic Jameson (1981) to argue that we should apply a “double hermeneutic” to a work of art in order to uncover its necessarily ambiguous relationship to the ideology of the ruling classes. This double hermeneutic consists of two interpretive strategies. First, through a negative hermeneutic Rose seeks to elucidate all the aspects of Pythian 10 that reveal its support for the ruling class that sponsored it. This support consists both in the active containment and mystification of any sources of discontent or opposition to that ruling class and in the suggestion that the ruling-class version of reality is the true and only possible version. This process of containment, however, necessarily generates a space, which Jameson terms the text's political unconscious, in which the opposition to that ideology becomes visible and alternative versions of reality become conceivable. The positive hermeneutic, therefore, aims at uncovering those dimensions of Pythian 10 which “call into question or negate the ruling class version of reality” (Rose 1992, 36). Rose's method thus implies two inseparable components to an artwork, regardless of the author's intention: support of the ruling ideology (praise) and criticism of it (blame).

These two components correspond to the distinctions we have been using between controlled and uncontrolled disorder and between the two different types of reduced laughter outlined by Bakhtin. What Rose demonstrates is that these two components are inseparable — the same elements that contribute to one contribute to the other. The elements that constitute a mystification of disruptive discourses and thus maintain the ruling ideology also evoke and realize those disruptive discourses. Rose therefore offers us a model for understanding the presence of both sorts of reduced laughter in the Odes: those elements that from the point of view of the negative hermeneutic are managed and reduced, in the sense of being transformed, also serve, from the point of view of the positive hermeneutic, to question that very management. The laughter in the Odes is therefore reduced in both of Bakhtin's senses; the two forms of reduction must coexist, and to ask which type of reduced laughter is found in the Odes is to ask an ill-formed question. The Jameson-Rose model can further help us understand how the patron has an interest in the inclusion of carnival in the ode that he has commissioned. According to this model, disruptive discourses are also gratifications that compensate for an audience's ideological adherence (Jameson 1981, 287–288; Rose 1992, 30, 36). Hence the successful imposition of ruling-class ideology entails that the artwork offer, in return for its containment of carnival polyphony, some evocation of that polyphony that will satisfy the audience, albeit in a limited way. The simple claim to absolute truth that the poet makes on behalf of the version of reality propagated by his patrons is thus actually guaranteed by the polyphonic background from which it emerges.

We can thus see not only how the dialogism of Nemean 1 or Demodocus' song of Ares and Aphrodite develops, but also how it contributes to the poet's ability to manage disruptive discourses. Yet the danger involved for high literature in this strategy is obvious: the carnival images may in fact overwhelm their attempted management and transform the intended praise into abuse. This possibility seems to be realized in another of Pindar's Odes, Nemean 7, which all but collapses under the force of the carnival threat it turns upon itself, and it is to this ode that we now turn.

As in the other odes, carnival laughter seems carefully circumscribed in Nemean 7. It only enters the final, shocking lines, where its trace can be seen in the particular conception of truth there conveyed. The way is opened for this conception by the almost obsessive anxiety concerning truth displayed in the rest of this ode, which contains at least four words for truth and falsehood (23, 25, 49, 63), and possibly two more as well (25, 85). (These two possibilities are editorial emendations, the first Bergk's and the second Bury's. Bury's is insufficiently justified (cf. Bury 1890, 141–142; Carey 1981, 173; Lefkowitz 1991, 66–68), but Bergk's is more plausible (although it is something of a favorite emendation of his: cf. Is. 2.10, and see Carey 1981, 146–147).) But even excluding both of these possibilities, the total of four words for truth and falsity exceeds the number in any other of the forty–five odes. We may also note that euonumos, “fair-named”, or “correctly named”, occurs twice in this ode, but only five times elsewhere.

In lines 14–16 Pindar offers an explicit model of truth that he claims as his own: “We know [how to provide] a mirror for fine deeds in [only] one way; if indeed through bright-filleted Memory a recompense for toils is found in the glorifying words of songs” (Ne. 7.14–16). Pindar likens his odes to a mirror, claiming not only that a direct relation between deed and word is possible, but also that it is achieved in his poetry. He even specifies that there is only one way (one tropos) in which the mirror serves its purpose (see, however, Hubbard 1985, 102–103). There can be only one account, and its guiding light is Memory, a concept intimately linked with that of truth in the Greek mind through its etymological connection to non-forgetting. Pindar sees his role as that of a witness, carefully but forcefully sorting out truth from falsehood.

To stress this point, Pindar then turns in Nemean 7 to critique various stories and judgments concerning three ambiguous figures, Odysseus, Ajax and Neoptolemus, and proceeds to sort out the real characters from the fictional ones. Odysseus' fame, Pindar says, is “greater than his suffering, on account of the sweet words of Homer” (21). Odysseus seems to be partly to blame also as he is the narrator of many of his own most celebrated feats (see Most 1985, 148–151, and also Carey 1981, 144–146 and Lloyd-Jones 1973, 127–131). Pindar quickly rejects as false the judgment that Ajax was inferior to Odysseus (24–25), but his treatment of Neoptolemus is rather more complex. Without explicitly saying so, he proceeds to substitute his own version for the usual story of Neoptolemus' death. In other representations, in art and literature, Neoptolemus is an almost wholly dark character, the man who killed the aged Priam and the infant son of Hector. And to judge from an account found elsewhere in Pindar, in his sixth Paean, narrations of his death were equally unfavorable (see e.g., Most 1985, 157–182, 207–210; Nagy 1979, 118–141; and Carnes in this volume).⁵ Here, however, Pindar offers a pious and much-liked Neoptolemus, in contradiction of these other versions. And, although he does not initially say so, Pindar makes this correction in the name of truth; for, as his narration of the myth comes to a close, Pindar envisages Neoptolemus on trial, with Apollo as the star witness guaranteeing the truth of Pindar's account (the interpretation of Most 1985, 173–180): “For true justice three words will suffice.⁶ No false witness is he who stands over the deeds of your and Zeus' descendants, Aegina” (Ne. 7.48–50). “Three words” means here simply “A few words” (Lloyd-Jones 1973, 133), and “true” translates euonumos, literally “right-named”. For Pindar, Apollo establishes the true connection between word and deed, the right naming of Neoptolemus; in so doing, Apollo of course fulfills the task of the victory poet. For behind the image of Apollo testifying on Neoptolemus' behalf is that of the poet recording the victor's excellence (cf. 61–63).

Up to this point, the ode has followed the simple aristocratic ideology on which Pindar's praise seems to depend: there are deeds which are truly noble and deeds which are truly despicable, and it is possible to distinguish the two. But this solid self-confident aristocratic ideology is thrown into confusion by the final lines of the ode. These lines exhibit all the density of meaning to be expected in lyric poetry, and must be examined in some detail. In them Pindar returns to his treatment of Neoptolemus: “But my heart will never admit that I mutilated Neoptolemus with unchanging words. To repeat the same things three or four times tokens a lack of resource, like Zeus' son Corinthus barking vainly at children” (Ne. 7.102–05). In these lines Pindar offers a radically different picture of his role as an epinician poet. He aims not for the truth that is found in a single account, often reiterated, but for the truth of a multiple, various account. The “three” words which earlier in the ode would secure “right-named justice” for Neoptolemus have become three idle repetitions. This scorn of sameness reveals why Pindar vaunts his ability to tell a different story of Neoptolemus: it is not because he believes that the previous story is incorrect (as he seemed to earlier in the ode), but because he has suddenly become a champion of difference. The translation offered here supports this thesis, although it has been challenged (e.g., Lloyd-Jones 1973, 135–136). In particular the word “unchanging” is a matter of debate, but other possible meanings fail to impress (cf. Most 1985, 203–209). More importantly, interpretations that avoid the sense of “unchanging” obscure the reference in the word to Pindar's earlier mirror image for the ode; for the Greek word used here, atropos, looks back to the claim that the ode mirrors deeds “in one tropes”, or “way”. This pointed reference underlines the fact that what once was one has now become many.

This sudden privileging of a multiple account of events as the true version reflects a sudden assertion of the ode's carnival context. Just as a carnivalized Amphitryon deserves both praise and blame, a carnivalized Neoptolemus is a Neoptolemus whose value circulates indefinitely (and who thus challenges the official value system): now. a sacrilegious pirateer, he deserves abuse, now, a pious pilgrim, he deserves praise.

This new conception of truth is symbolized by the poet's presentation of himself as Odysseus, who enters the ode through the disputed word “unchanging”. For when combined with a negative (“not unchanging”), the word cannot fail to remind us of “the man of many changes”, the “polytropic” character introduced by the first line of the Odyssey. Atropia, or “changelessness”, seems to have been a catchword for the antithesis of Odysseus' ability to adapt and survive, for an archaic elegy in the Theognidea contrasts a man caught in “changelessness” to a man “of many twists” who changes his character according to his surroundings as a polyp changes its color (Thgn. 213–218). This is a reference to the Odysseus of the Odyssey who is compared to a polyp when he attempts to hold on to a rock in a storm (Od. 5.432–435), and it has been recognized as such by readers of the Theognidea (e.g., Nagy 1982. 120–122).

The introduction of Odysseus is significant for two reasons. First, it further underlines the oppositional relation of these final lines to the rest of the ode, since Odysseus has already appeared, as we noted above, in the negative light of an untrustworthy source who perverts the monotone truth of praise. Second, Odysseus, in particular the polytropic Odysseus of the Odyssey, is a symbol of a carnivalized notion of identity. For in the Odyssey, as Peradotto argues (1990), the presentation of Odysseus is informed by a more dynamic conception of character which allows a subject to be plural, and prevents it from becoming ossified and defined by a single narrative account. Odysseus himself is presented as aware of and largely responsible for this new idea of identity, because it is for the most part he who constructs his own character through his narratives of his own adventures. Most famously, in order to trick the cyclops into saying that “no man” is attacking him, he denies all identity to himself by assuming the purely negative name of Noman. This denial of character is also an assertion of the multiplicity of his character; in Peradotto's words, Noman is the “negativity capable of the fullest and most polymorphic character development” (1990, 155). This name-which-is-not-a-name exposes the fiction sustained by proper names that there is an essence which names qualify, and offers in its place a new, multiple, indeterminate truth of identity.

Such an idea belongs to carnival. We have already seen that carnival symbols can be unbundled and split into a variety of different characters, as the single figure of carnival man is split into the master Don Quixote and his servant Sancho Panza, or into the cuckold Amphitryon and his glorious heir Heracles. But in the pages of Rabelais and His World there is a much closer carnival parallel to the empowering negativity of the Odyssean Noman, and that is the figure of Nemo, the comic creation of a French Monk, Radulfus Glaber (RW, 413–415). The joke of Nemo, the Latin for Noman, is based on the same semantic sleight of hand as that of Odysseus' Noman. Nemo is superhuman precisely because he can do what no man can do. He knows what no man knows, sees what no man sees, and does what no man is permitted to do. Nemo represents carnival negation, the negation of normal human limitations, but for Bakhtin these limitations are those imposed by church and state. Odysseus' Noman, however, negates the limitations of language and naming that define, compartmentalize and value things in one particular way as if that way were the only one.

Nemean 7's closing reference to Corinthus, the son of Zeus, also situates the ode's final lines in Bakhtin's marketplace. Corinthus is rather an obscure figure to us, but one assumes he was a proverbial bore well known to his ancient audience. We do know, however, that he belongs to the literary tradition of the carnival in Greek literature, since his only other appearances in classical literature come in two of Aristophanes' comedies and in one of Plato's dialogues, where he is also a figure of fun (Aristophanes Frogs 443, Ecclesiazusae 828, Plato Euthydemus 292e3; see Most 1985, 206–207 n. 122).

What then can be said of Nemean 7? If we apply the critical method of the double hermeneutic elucidated by Rose to the epilogue, we can see not only that it offers gestures both of support and of criticism of the patron, but also that these two opposite gestures are interdependent. The negative hermeneutic elucidates the ode's management of the carnival notion of truth and of the Odyssean narrator, and its use of them to validate its monologic tactics of support for the patron's propaganda. The positive hermeneutic stresses instead the simple presence of this notion of truth and this sort of narrator-persona, explores the challenge they constitute to praise-poetry and notes the emphasis they receive by their position. The double hermeneutic ensures that we will not ignore the critique, but rather see it as necessary for the support of the patron's propaganda. Once the process is complete, we are left (like those who commissioned the odes) to ponder whether the ode succeeds in managing disruptive forces, or whether its praise is swallowed by carnival laughter; but, whatever our judgment, Nemean 7 offers a spectacular demonstration of the extent to which Pindar's Odes, so dependent on simple assignments of praise, encourage the carnival notion of truth within themselves.

From the evidence of Pindar's Odes, it appears that carnival laughter assumes a complex role in high literature. When it enters this literature, it is reduced in both the senses distinguished by Bakhtin — on the one hand it is transformed, robbed of its universal application and its challenge to established ideologies, but on the other hand it is merely muffled and maintains this challenge. The aim of the author in including carnival laughter is to manage it and use it to validate the monologic statements that support the ruling class's version of reality. A conflict thus develops in such literature between monologic poetic statements and the dialogism of carnival, and it is this engagement with genuine carnival laughter that transforms Pindar's poetry from simple statements of praise into the rich encomium that is truly a product of the carnival, or komos, from which it takes its name.

NOTES

1. Cf., however, Nagy 1979, 243–252, Kurke 1991, 100–101, and Miller 1994, 27–28, who emphasize that epinician and iambus share the context of the komos, but stress Py. 2.54–56 over O1. 9.1–10 and so separate Pindar and Archilochas.

2. On the connection of Old Comedy to the carnival, see Platter 1993, and of iambus to Old Comedy, Rosen 1988.

3. Translations of Greek texts are my own.

4. Crotty (1982, 56–57) sees Demodocus' song about the Trojan horse (8.499–520) as the victory ode because it refers to Odysseus, but, as we shall see, the song of Hephaestus, which is performed directly after the victory, does also.

5. Nagy shows, however, that Neoptolemus' antisocial behavior is a precondition of his heroization in Delphic cult. There is considerable disagreement over whether Pindar is correcting an earlier account here: see, e.g., Lefkowitz 1991, 137–145; Fogelmark 1972, 104–132; Lloyd-Jones 1973, 197; Carey 1981, 133–137; and bibliography cited in Most 1985.

6. Most translates “For an auspicious trial […]”.

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