The ‘Problem of Unity’ in Pindar: An Old Chestnut, New Perspectives

The article considers unity and its counterpart, digression, as themes within Pindar’s own poetry, rather than a ‘problem’ for criticism to ‘solve’. The article considers Pindar’s treatment of action, time, and place (the so-called ‘Aristotelian unities’) alongside the modern critical concept of deixis (temporal, spatial, and person deixis). The property of indexical statements of being centred on a certain person, place, or time (‘me’, ‘here’, ‘now’; ‘him’, ‘there’, ‘then’) makes them naturally conducive to the creation of centripetal or centrifugal dynamics in a Pindaric ode, according to whether the implied deictic centre is constant or variable. It is argued that an important way of understanding Pindaric unity is as a complex equilibrium and counterpointing of competing and complementary principles of centripetalism and centrifugalism, not only acting within and across the areas of action, time, place, and person, but also observable in Pindar’s handling of grammatical, metrical, and thematic structures.