Frame, Setting and Genre

The Symposion as a Context for Sung Praise in the Fragmentary Skolia of Pindar and Bacchylides

Abstract

This article explores several fragmentary epinician and sympotic poems by Pindar and Bacchylides, focusing on how they frame themselves within the imagined space of the symposion. Rather than reflecting a historical performance context, these texts construct a fictional setting marked by rich deictic play (“here,” “now”) and intertextual gestures that position the ode within a broader poetic tradition. The study draws a distinction between actual historical performance and the performance scenario created within the text itself, arguing that this internal framing enables re-performance and genre-conscious reflection. The symposion functions not as a literal performance venue but as a cultural topos that shapes the ode’s rhetorical and performative strategies. Through layered deixis, metapoetic commentary, and mimetic imagery, the poems blur the boundaries between epinician and encomiastic genres and foreground the mechanisms by which poetic texts generate social memory, legitimacy, and praise.