Henry Spelman - Pindar and the Poetics of Permanence

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a lot more to produce a monograph about Pindar. This particular monograph represents a revised version of the first two parts of an Oxford DPhil thesis submitted in 2015. I am most grateful to the Rhodes Trust, Balliol College, Oxford, Magdalen College, Oxford, the Oxford classics faculty, and Christs College, Cambridge for the financial and institutional support that enabled me to enjoy the luxury of spending years thinking about ancient literature with a roof over my head and food in my stomach. In fact, the food was often excellent.

Patrick Lake patiently instructed me in the rudiments of Greekeven after my nose bled profusely over my first test, which I failed. Henry V. Bender taught me how to read a text and took my ideas seriously even when they did not deserve that. William H. Race once thought it worth three hours of his week to read through all of Pindar with a sophomore English major who wanted to do an independent study. He also read and commented on the doctoral thesis that eventually grew from those thrilling meetings and from the fascination with ancient poetry which they kindled in me. Patrick Finglass kindly agreed to supervise the first year of my doctorate at Oxford and has since continued to share his warm friendship and sage advice. My supervisor, Gregory Hutchinson, guided me along the road to submission with his singular insight, erudition, and good humour. Without him both this work and I myself would be very different and very much worse off. Douglas Cairns served as my external examiner and provided invaluable guidance in improving this work in preparation for publication. Felix Budelmann served as my internal examiner as well as a constant sounding board and source of inspiration in many senses. My advisor for the Oxford Classical Monographs Series, Angus Bowie, helped greatly to enhance the clarity and readability of the final text. Whatever blunders and infelicities remain therein by no means reflect on the generosity and wisdom of all those remarkable individuals who helped me to see it through to completion.

Sara VanDerBeeks Roman Woman I kept faithful watch over my desk throughout the last year of revision. I am grateful to the artist for permitting her work to be reproduced on the cover.

More purely personal debts, far too numerous to be recorded here, have been acknowledged elsewhere and in other ways. My deepest debt is acknowledged in the dedication.