Pythian 6

Pindar’s Pythian 6 is one of the earliest attested compositions attributed to this poet. Highlighted in Pindar’s song here is the grand epic moment when the youthful hero Antilokhos gives up his own life for his father Nestor after the old hero gets entangled in his chariot—and is just seconds away from getting killed by the hero Memnon, whose onrush is now thwarted by the dutiful son. Antilokhos gets killed while rescuing his father, and the song of Pindar goes on to praise the young hero’s filial piety by holding it up as a model for Thrasyboulos, son of Xenokrates of Akragas. The father’s chariot team was winner of the four-horse chariot race in 490 BCE at the Pythian Festival in Delphi. In the comments that follow, we will see that the chariot driver may well have been Thrasyboulos himself, as signaled by way of a gesture: he is pictured as crowning himself with a garland of victory. A parallel gesture is noted by Malcolm Bell in his study of a most celebrated marble statue known today as the Motya Charioteer.

It seems fashionable, I must add, for modern literary critics to doubt an ancient report about Thrasyboulos, transmitted in the scholia for Pindar (at Pythian 6.15 ed. Drachmann), where we read that some interpreters thought that this young man was actually the driver of the victorious four-horse chariot of his father, while others thought that the victorious charioteer was not Thrasyboulos but an Athenian named Nikomakhos, whom we see being praised elsewhere as the driver of the victorious four-horse team of Xenokrates, in Pindar Isthmian 2.22. Elsewhere in the scholia (at Pythian6.13 ed. Drachmann), it is noted elliptically that Thrasyboulos was somehow in charge (ἐπιστατεῖ) of the chariot team competing in the Pythian chariot race (τῶν ἱππικῶν ἀγώνων).

Motya charioteer. As noted by Bell (1995:22), “During the sack of Akragas in 406 [BCE], the Carthaginians will not have looked kindly” at monuments glorifying the city’s former rulers, and “this may have been the moment when the face and the genitals of the sculpture were intentionally damaged.” Image via Wikimedia Commons.