Among nearly 200 volumes concerning the sublime in fields from art to video games, published just within the last 20 years, a number examine ancient authors (Statius, Virgil, Lucan, Lucretius et al.). F. couples this approach with the even more ubiquitous turn to reception. The result is less a granular literary history than a demonstration of what might be gained from Jaussian reader-response criticism (p. 134). With its unusual combined emphases, this heartfelt study should prompt further debate about the value of Greek lyric and how to read it.
Documenting devices that power Pindar's moments of sublimity draws F. closer to Longinus’ pedagogical project than to Romantic effusions (Hölderlin's Alps, Leopardi's sweet drowning in the Infinite). While acutely aware of the sublime's poetic and critical legacies, and not averse to emoting warmly about key passages, he is more attuned to rhetoric than pyrotechnics. The book's tone and pace clearly emerge from masterful teaching, making it an excellent introduction for students; Pindarists will find nothing new, but that contentious gang is not the main audience. The protreptic hook of the ‘sublime’ fades into the woodwork (for long stretches the word never appears). Instead, we get workmanlike catalogues, close paraphrases with remarks on image, word placement and theme, and, in general, what used to be called literary ‘appreciation’. The alleged tension between a shadowy group of ‘historicists’ and critics seeking the ‘literary’ frequently underwrites F.'s reactions; his alliance with the latter, he thinks, aligns with rediscovery of the ‘text’ by a younger generation (mainly the contributors to F. Budelmann and T. Phillips [edd.], Textual Events [2018]). But F. shies away from engaging more deeply with the dynamic of hic et nunc first-performance vs later reception or attempting a much-needed unified field theory.
Near the midpoint (pp. 134–5) he articulates what he finds sublime: Pindar's ‘majestic language, his aesthetics of surprise, his kaleidoscopic imagery, his profound mythological imagination and … his way of wringing every drop of meaning out of his occasions … his melding of the ephemeral and the transcendental’. Pythian 8, along these lines, captures the ‘transient kairos, the sublime but doomed moment of human excellence and happiness’. Brushing aside dubious politics (what M. Finley called Pindar's ‘odious beliefs’), F. directs us instead to the poet's immersive visions as ‘the essence of literature’. In other words: sociopoetic concerns arising from the embeddedness of choral performance can be skirted by talk of textual afterlives and alleged universals like ‘the sublime’. Yet, as Tennyson observed, Pindar also featured ‘long tracts of gravel with immensely large nuggets embedded’. A balanced view would deal with those ground-level features first and then try to explain how Pindar (unlike Bacchylides?) really took flight.
F.'s reactions cluster around two features of the sublime that he distils (in Chapter 1) from Longinus and later interpreters: ‘Shared Experience’ (Chapter 2) and ‘Exceeding Limits’ (Chapter 3). The latter is clear enough, but F. must argue more strenuously about immediacy (basically enargeia) being essential to communal sublime experience (since it characterised most ancient literature).
Chapter 1 begins with Pindar's early reputation for magnificence, from hugely influential Horatian imagery (Ode 4.2) to dissection by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Comp. 22). What the latter analyses is a dithyramb (fr. 75), but F. throughout overrides generic distinctions, focusing almost entirely on epinicians. Ancient readers were likely more discriminating. Horace's Pindar – the surging river – is associated right off with audacious dithyrambs (4.2.10–12); by contrast, paeans, epinicians, laments and encomia are not pinned to ‘sublime’ stylistic features (4.2.13–24), even if the ‘Dircean swan’ embodies elevation. The annoying Pindar-quoting poet whom Aristophanes satirises is a maker of dithyrambs, partheneia and Simonidean knock-offs (Birds 917–19), who recites a huporchema for Hieron (fr. 105ab). Cratinus in deflating the Theban Eagle's balloon, probably mocked paeanic diction, as J. Porter suggests in his unsurpassed survey (The Sublime in Antiquity [2016], pp. 331–4). Even Longinus’ single overt reference to Pindar acknowledges, alongside wildfire power, his frequent earthward falls, right after praising for uncontrolled sublime ecstasies Cratinus’ model, Archilochus.
Moving briskly through early modern reflections about the sublime and Pindar, F. concentrates on salient ideas like enthusiasm, poetic genius and paratactic style. A brief section on English poets (Cowley, Dryden, Gray) and their critics (Johnson, Congreve, Addison) is followed by a denser review of Pindar's place in the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, when Boileau, translator of Longinus, defended the poet's ‘fair disorder’ against Perrault's satirical suggestions that it was all gibberish (galimatias). Voltaire later kept up the cynical opposition (Pindar ‘had the talent of speaking much while saying nothing’), but it was Boileau's viewpoint that captured the imagination, especially when Germans got into the game. Friedrich Klopstock, the ‘German Pindar’, enthused over Pindaric sublimity; Goethe admired his poetic control; Hölderlin wrestled his style into translations that produced astonishment and dismay – F.'s close reading (pp. 38–9) of a rendition of Pythian 4 is a highlight of this section. Hölderlin's crucial role for future reception is framed by F.'s highly compressed yet illuminating explication of the views of Burke, Kant, Schiller and Schelling on art, beauty and nature. Guided by Adorno's essay (on Hölderlin's late lyric), F. shifts to discuss lyric parataxis, with a somewhat digressive analysis of Sappho, fr. 16, mention of which allows him to return to Longinus’ famous reading of Sappho, fr. 31. Her surface limpidity and disturbed depths, F. asserts, ‘set up a cognitive gap which can never quite be bridged; and this is sublime’ (p. 48). With terms reversed, the same is found of Pindar. Paratactic juxtaposition, meanwhile, finds its analogue in divine epiphany within the later poet's myths. Less convincingly, F. applies Burke's notion (sublime as contained terror) to the Pindaric topos about phthonos shadowing splendid athletic achievements. The next chapter bases its title ‘Shared Experience’ on Longinus’ idea (7.3) that the sublime produces a joyful feeling of unity between composer and hearer. Under this head F. tucks Pindar's persona, the poetic ‘I’, relations to Muse and audience, metapoetic passages and the kairos – much of which might appear tangential to his theme, all of which is debated by specialists. Countering what he dubs the ‘relentless focus on the occasion of the first performance’ (p. 55), F. looks instead to features that he imagines as appealing to secondary and tertiary audiences. Once again, it would have helped to explain in what ways the so-called ‘anthropological approach’ does not value such poetic craft: opposition members are not named. For his side, F. finds Culler useful on apostrophe, Foucault on the author-function and Ankersmit on ‘sublime historical experience’. But the more the sublime devolves into love and loss (p. 70), the syntax of uncontrolled excitement (p. 71), the feeling of ‘being there’ (p. 77) or inaccessibility (p. 95), the less hermeneutically useful it becomes. F. is on surer ground when cataloguing occurrences of the komos, performative futures and lyric speaker-positions.
Equally full of careful observations of epinician textures, Chapter 3, ‘Exceeding Limits’, raises tough questions about the power of language to capture the transcendent, whether through metaphor or personification. Moira, Aisa, Potmos and others are meticulously tracked, and connections among them nicely teased out. Pindar's synaesthetic riots of jostling, riddling metaphors are held up for admiration and their paradoxical function – to construct ineffability – explained. Myth is adduced as creating a sense of the sublime when it flirts with the border between the divine and mortal. There are fine-grained analyses of Olympians 1, 6, 7 and 13, Nemean 10, and above all, the universally acknowledged purple passages of Pythian 1 and 8 (cited often in the book). It is a pleasure to re-experience these poems through F.'s acute senses. As it advances a debate (humanism vs history) that goes back to Hermann and Boeckh, the book also accomplishes what F. thinks reception study must do (p. 55): ‘shake the critic out of unfounded complacency’.
