Aegina: Contexts for Choral Lyric Poetry
Myth, History, and Identity in the Fifth Century BC

A collection of essays dealing with different aspects of the fifth-century BC history and culture of the Greek island of Aegina, famous for its magnificent architecture and sculpture, and for its inhabitants' patronage of some of the greatest Classical poets.

This collection of essays by notable scholars from a variety of disciplines deals with different aspects of the history and culture of the Greek island of Aegina in the fifth century BC. The island is well known as the home of magnificent architecture and sculpture; as the patron of impressive lyric poetry composed by Pindar and his contemporaries; and, from the pages of Herodotus, as a significant trading power, and military threat to her great neighbour Athens. The book brings together experts on choral lyric poetry, myth, art-history, and historiography, with the aim of offering a broad view of the island's significance in some of the major trends in fifth-century Greek history and culture, and situating the island's patronage of some of the greatest Classical poets within broader cultural and historical frames.

Introduction: Aegina in Contexts
I. CONTEXTS FOR HEROIC MYTH-MAKING: ETHNICITY, INTERSTATE RELATIONS, CULT, AND COMMERCE
1. Asopos and his Multiple Daughters: Traces of Preclassical Epic in the Aeginetan Odes of Pindar
2. Rethinking the Sanctuary of Aphaia
3. 'The Thearion of the Pythian One': The Aeginetan Thearoi in Context
4. Musical Merchandise 'on every vessel': Religion and Trade on Aegina
II. POETRY, PERFORMANCE, POLITICS
5. Aeginetan Epinician Culture: Naming, Ritual, and Politics
6. Aeginetan Odes, Reperformance, and Intertextuality
III. INTERFACES BETWEEN POETRY, MYTH, AND ART
7. Giving Wings to the Aeginetan Sculptures: The Panhellenic Aspirations of Pindar's Eighth Olympian
8. Thebes, Aegina, and the Temple of Aphaia: A Reading of Pindar's Isthmian 6
9. The Trojan War, Theoxenia, and Aegina in Pindar's Paean 6 and the Aphaia Sculptures
IV. THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL AFTERMATH
10. Herodotus on Aeginetan Identity
11. 'Lest the things done by men become exitela': Writing up Aegina in a Late Fifth-Century Context