I.8.56-62

|56 τὸν μὲν οὐδὲ θανόντ’ ἀοιδαὶ <ἐπ>έλιπον, |57 ἀλλά οἱ παρά τε πυρὰν τάφον θ’ Ἑλικώνιαι παρθένοι |58 στάν, ἐπὶ θρῆνόν τε πολύφαμον ἔχεαν. |59 ἔδοξ’ ἦρα καὶ ἀθανάτοις, |60 ἐσλόν γε φῶτα καὶ φθίμενον ὕμνοις θεᾶν διδόμεν. |61 τὸ καὶ νῦν φέρει λόγον, ἔσσυταί τε Μοισαῖον ἅρμα Νικοκλέος |62 μνᾶμα πυγμάχου κελαδῆσαι.

|56 Even when he [= Achilles] died, the songs did not leave him, |57 but the Maidens of Helicon [= the Muses] stood by his pyre and his funeral mound, |58 and, as they stood there, they poured forth a song of lamentation [thrēnos] that is famed far and wide. |59 And so it was that the immortal gods decided |60 to hand over the man, genuine [esthlos] as he was even after he had perished [phthi-n-esthai] in death, to the songs of the goddesses [= the Muses]. |61 And this, even now, wins as a prize the words of song, as the chariot-team of the Muses starts moving on its way |62 to glorify the memory of Nikokles the boxer.

(What follows is epitomized from H24H 4§§4–5, where I add relevant bibliography.)

§4. The song is saying here that Achilles will die in war and will thus stop flourishing, that is, he will ‘perish’, as expressed by the verb phthinesthai, but the medium that conveys the message of death will never perish. This medium is pictured as a choral lyric song eternally sung by the Muses as they lament Achilles after he is cut down. The lyric song is pictured as a lament that will be transformed by the Muses into a song of glory. Although Achilles will personally ‘perish’, phthi-n-esthai, the song about him is destined to have a poetic glory that will never perish. The wording here corresponds to what we read in Homeric poetry, I.09.413, where it is foretold that the poetic kleos, ‘glory’, of Achilles will be a-phthi-ton, ‘imperishable’, forever. The Homeric use of kleos in such contexts is parallel to the use of this same word in the songmaking of Pindar, whose words proudly proclaim his mastery of the prestige conferred by kleos or poetic ‘glory’, as at N 7.61–63.

§5a. According to Pindar’s song, the death of the athlete Nikokles will not impede the glory that he merited as a victorious boxer: rather, the death of this athlete is said to be the key to the continuation of his own glory, just as the death of Achilles was the key to the extension of heroic glory into the historical present.

§5b. Pindar’s song says that the death of Nikokles, by virtue of his deeds in the historical present, will be honored by the same tradition of song that honored the death of Achilles by virtue of that hero’s deeds in the heroic past. Thus the name of Nikokles, Nīkoklēs or ‘he who has the glory [kleos] of victory [nīkē]’, has a meaning that is relevant to the poetics of Pindar’s victory ode.

§5c. But there is another name in this song that is even more relevant. The cousin of Nikokles, whose victory in an athletic event of boxing is highlighted in the song, was a young man named Kleandros, who as I noted at the beginning was the winner in the athletic event of the pankration at the festival of the Isthmia and who was the primary recipient of honor in this victory ode. The name of Kleandros, Kleandros or ‘he who has the glories-of-men [klea andrōn]’, is proclaimed as the first word of this whole song of Pindar’s (Isthmian 8.1). As I noted in the comment at I.8.1, the placement of his name at the very beginning of the song composed in his honor is exceptional. And the meaning of this name fits perfectly the meaning of the expression klea andrōn, ‘the glories of men’, as we see it used in epic. The past deeds of heroes, worthy as they are of kleos‘glory’, may be said to extend all the way to the present. Whenever the contemporary deed is worthy of kleos, as in the case of an athletic victory, the prize that is won by the athletic victor is the kleos itself. To win such a kleos is ‘to win-as-a-prize [= verb pherein] the words [logos]’, I.8.61.