O.5.1-24

Olympian 5 was composedd in honor of the victory by Psaumis of Kamarina in a mule-cart race at Olympia in 448 BCE. All we know of the victor comes from this and one other victory ode—Olympian 4—composed for an earlier victory in a chariot race. These two odes, Olympian 4 and Olympian 5, are the only Pindaric compositions commissioned by a patron from Kamarina, a Greek city located on the south shore of Sicily between Akragas and Gela in the west and Syracuse in the east. Although the proper names of Kamarina and Olympia occur only once in Olympian 5, many paraphrases for both locations metonymically direct our attention to one place or the other. (For a definition of metonymy, see the Inventory of terms and names.) Remarkably, the apostrophe to the Olympic victor [Olumpionīkos], at O.5.21, notionally links the two locations: on the semantic level, it looks back to the place of victory, but on the level of ‘referential pointing’ (deixis), it addresses the victor in the ‘here and now’ (hic et nunc) of Kamarina, as evidenced by the reference to it, at O.5.20, as ‘this city’ [polis hēde]. In the song, Olympia is evoked in the image of ‘the six double altars at the greatest religious festival |6 with the sacrifices of oxen in the five days of athletic competitions’ (βωμοὺς ἓξ διδύμους ἐγέραρεν ἑορταῖς θεῶν μεγίσταις |6 ὑπὸ βουθυσίαις ἀέθλων τε πεμπαμέροις ἁμιλλαις), O.5.5–6, in the cultic references (without explicit narrative) to the heroes Pelops and Oinomaos, O.5.9, and in the landscape features that include the hill of Kronos, the river Alpheos, and an Idaian Cave. O.5.17–18. (For an identification of the cave, see the comment at O.5.18.). Kamarina, on the other hand, is pointed to in the invocation of its eponymous nymph and her ‘people-nourishing city’ (πόλιν λαοτρόφον) at O.5.4, the ‘newly-founded home’ (νέοικον ἕδραν) at O.5.8, and the landmarks such as the precinct of Athena, Lake Kamarina, and the rivers Oanos and Hipparis, O.5.10–14.

These thumbnail sketches of the two regions are not all grouped in discrete sections; in fact, they are so thoroughly interwoven in the fabric of the ode that the listener’s attention is continuously directed from one to the other, from the imagined to the visible, from the physical sight to the mind’s eye. Not even all the sites in Kamarina would have necessarily been visible from the site of the original performance (river Oanos, for example, is some 6 miles away from the ancient city), and this would have been especially the case in subsequent re-performances where the listeners might have experienced the song elsewhere in Sicily, at Olympia, or any other location. Overall, in the course of the song, the listener’s attention is guided from Olympia to Kamarina and back in no fewer than seven distinct spatial shifts: from Olympia to Kamarina at O.5.1, O.5.8, O.5.10, O.5.20, O.5.21 and from Kamarina to Olympia at O.5.5, O.5.17, O.5.21. An additional movement to the Olympic landscape, during the competition at the hippodrome, may even be registered at O.5.3 in the reference to the ‘tirelessly-running mule cart’ (ἀκαμαντόποδός τ᾽ ἀπήνας) of Psaumis, interjected between the two invocations of Kamarina, O.5.2 and O.5.4. However, the origo or the deictic center in the act of song’s utterance remains fixed in the homeland of Psaumis, as indicated by the verbs of motion dehkesthai ‘to receive’ (δέκευ), O.5.3, and hikanein ‘to come’ (ἵκων), O.5.9, anchored as they are in Kamarina, to which the victor is envisaged as returning and whose community is encouraged by the poet to welcome him with due celebration. In a reciprocal gesture, Pindar’s poetic persona is also presented as ‘arriving’ (ἔρχομαι), O.5.3, to the location of the festivities that include the very performance of the song.