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This chapter examines overlaps and differences between the treatment of particular individuals (including families), cities, and places in Thucydides and Pindar. It is organized geographically, covering individuals and places other than Aigina, Sparta, Kyrene, and Athens and individuals and places in Aigina, Sparta, Kyrene, and Athens. It is shown that the men Pindar wrote for Thucydides talked to. Politics and panhellenic kudos-conferring games are also discussed.

Pindar's Aiginetan odes were made for the commercial aristocracy of a small, civilised, and very rich island. The commercial success of Aigina attracted the interest of Argos and Epidauros, and for about a century the sea-going lords of Aigina supplied ships and probably tribute to one or the other of the older mainland powers. The storytellers of Aigina began very early to patch together a mythic cloak, a combination of borrowed Aiakid traditions with basic local legend, which should lend a distinguishing identity to the island lords. Pindar described the time he imagined the island encircled with Aiakid powers ready to hear its songs. This chapter looks at the legend involving Aiakos, Peleus, Phokos, Ajax, and Telamon, among other characters in Pindar's odes.

The lords of Aigina engaged in an act of mythic manipulation that was grandiose, arrogant, and antagonistic to Athens, in which the exploited Aiakids were not small cult statues but enormous pieces of sculpture, and they were not sent abroad but conspicuously hoisted up during the construction of an imposing local building. This was the new temple of Aphaia, put up in the 490s at the north-eastern tip of the island, on the site of an older temple that had burnt c.500 BC. Aphaia represented a combination of land and sea, being both nymph and naiad, and as divine inventor of the net she was a patron divinity of fishermen. She was close to Artemis and perhaps to Hekate, and votive figurines from her temple prove that, like her Olympian doublet, she was a virgin protector of children. This chapter examines the pediments of the Aphaia temple and its use as a place for cult activities.

The choral songs written by Pindar for the young athletes of Aigina offer a reliable sketch of the island's practice, as it recognised and commemorated an athletic victory. The patrons of the eleven odes for Aigina were not like any of Pindar's other clients, and the victors to be praised show a special quality as well, for in every case the successful athlete was probably more than twelve years old, but not yet eighteen. These boys share a common predilection for the oldest and most violent forms of contest, for there is but a single runner among them, while one has been victorious in the pentathlon, four are wrestlers, and five are pankratists. The young victors are moving towards a world of masculine maturity, both ideal and actual, and their celebrations give an appropriately ambivalent treatment to female figures.

The special problems Pindar had faced in making an ode for Lampon were intensified when, a few years later, another from Aigina, Telesarchos, commissioned an ode for his son, Kleandros. Isthmian 8 is a celebration of not only the youth, Kleandros, but also of his father's nephew, Nikokles, a victorious athlete who seems to be recently dead. Pindar utilises two key concepts, good hope and freedom, which direct that men should strive to fulfil their ambitions, stretch their courageous strength to its fullest, like the Aiakids, and then celebrate victory by giving free rein to healing song that imitates that of the Muses. Kleandros is ready to take on these responsibilities, for he moves into the adult state after a youth devoted to the harsh challenge of the pankration, the most warlike of contests.

Pindar's ode, Nemean 8, was performed to honour an adolescent boy who had chosen his father's event, the double-stade race, and duplicated his father's mainland victory. The song identifies Aigina, not with a despised Ajax, but with an admired Aiakos sought out by all as a panhellenic leader. It calls itself a gift brought to this legendary hero-founder in behalf of the island-city that he loves, a city that enjoys a permanence of god-given bliss. These are the announced conditions in which the present performers greet a youth who is entering his first season of love, and its initial tone of rich promise stands in stark contradiction to all readings and chronologies based upon a mistreated Aigina-Ajax and a dishonourable Athens-Odysseus. Here, Pindar gives a moment of poetic life to a jealous slander that killed, then asks, in a responding passage, for the power to distribute praise and blame correctly, thus offering celestial life to splendid actions.

In the ode Nemean 7, Pindar ostensibly praises a boy named Sogenes, the first Aiginetan to win the boys' pentathlon at the games held for Zeus at Nemea. It is a highly polished epinician performance on a grand scale, but thanks to a remark made by a Hellenistic commentator it is often read as if Pindar had here indulged in an act of private self-vindication. Nemean 7 ceases to be Pindar's contorted defence of himself and becomes instead an extended and inventive celebration of Sogenes. In its course, Nemean 7 moves its boy victor from birthchamber to palaistra, transferring him from the care of Eleithyia to that of Herakles. Such transfer is achieved, as one would expect, by way of an Aiakid, and it occurs under the patronage of a second female figure, that of Aigina. For critics ancient and modern, however, it has been Neoptolemos at Delphi who opens any discussion of Nemean 7.

According to ancient scholars, Pythian 8 was performed in 446 BC, shortly before Pindar's death. Pythian 8 is the first Pindaric ode known to have been performed on Aigina since the island lost its freedom to Athens. A system of five triads produces a cleanly marked sequence of invocation, turn towards Aigina and victor, mimesis of mythic episode, prayerful precaution, and direct praise, but in every part there are anomalies and innovations. Here, Hesychia has nothing maternal or kourotrophic about her. Instead, she promises the kind of luxury that adults appreciate while she also carries a bitter threat of violence, for she is Janus-faced. Both personifications are closely associated with Apollo and through him with song and choral dancing, activities in which disorder and rebellion are unthinkable. The song turns directly to the actual triumphs of Aristomenes, a boy who has posted a victory each at Marathon and at Megara, and three wins at the local games for Hera.

Pindar meant that his odes for the young athletes of Aigina should bring audiences into the state of healing jollity that he called Euphrosyna. As distinct from the symposium, a victory celebration had a further and more complex aim, for the choral performance was meant to present the victor with his own triumph rendered imperishable, while it also offered that same permanent glory to his neighbours and friends. The audience, in all eleven odes, was essentially the same, a gathering of aristocrats united in wealth, commercial interests, cult duties, and devotion to the Aiakids. In all cases, however, this group was joined by an ‘outside’ element, for immature boys appeared among its active men and responsible elders. The celebration introduced this adolescent group to the ways of maturity, while the elders were led to accept the imminent newcomers, and spectators of all ages were brought to a common experience of the magic of success.

This book considers the eleven odes composed by Pindar for the athletes of Aigina and looks at the pleasures taken and the influences felt as a particular audience watched each performance. The odes are ample in scale, richly textured, constructed around a central mythic passage, and all seemed to celebrate victors who have not yet reached manhood. This discussion of the Aiginetan victory songs assumes performance by troupes of singing male dancers, amateurs who were, like the victors, not yet eighteen years old. These entered, well-rehearsed, and naked or nearly so, into a limited space (hall or courtyard of a house in town, or perhaps in one case the lower terrace of the Apollo temple) and there entertained a small and familiar audience — the relatives and friends of the host, most of whom had, at least as boys, performed similar choral songs.

Ever since Edward Gibbon wrote his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the question why, when and indeed whether this great Roman Empire fell has been vigorously pursued by historians. It has been observed that at least 210 explanations have been offered, some frankly ridiculous (‘Semitization’, homosexuality, decline in manliness). The argument that it was the barbarian invasions that destroyed Rome – both the city and its empire – lost favour and has returned to favour. Some historians have insisted that the whole concept of the ‘fall of Rome’ is a misconception, and have emphasized the continuity of the Roman inheritance. Yet from a Mediterranean perspective, it is abundantly clear that the unity of the Great Sea had been shattered by 800. That leaves several centuries in which to place the process of disintegration, and several suspects: the Germanic barbarians in the fifth century and after, the Arab conquerors in the seventh century, Charlemagne and his Frankish armies in the eighth century, not to mention internal strife as Roman generals competed for power, either seeking regional dominions or the crown of the empire itself. Evidently there was no single ‘cause’ for the decline of Rome, and it was precisely the accumulation of dozens of problems that brought the old order to an end, rupturing the ‘Second Mediterranean’. During the long period from 400 to 800, the Mediterranean split apart economically and also politically: the Roman emperors saw that the task of governing the Mediterranean lands and vast tracts of Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube exceeded the capacity of one man. Diocletian, ruling from 284 onwards, based himself in the east at Nikomedeia, and entrusted the government of the empire to a team of co-emperors, first another ‘Augustus’ in the west, and then, from 293 to 305, two deputies or ‘Caesars’ as well, a system known as the Tetrarchy.