This collection of essays by notable scholars from a variety of disciplines deals with different aspects of the history and culture of the Greek island of Aegina in the fifth century BC. The island is well known as the home of magnificent architecture and sculpture; as the patron of impressive lyric poetry composed by Pindar and his contemporaries; and, from the pages of Herodotus, as a significant trading power, and military threat to her great neighbour Athens. The book brings together experts on choral lyric poetry, myth, art-history, and historiography, with the aim of offering a broad view of the island's significance in some of the major trends in fifth-century Greek history and culture, and situating the island's patronage of some of the greatest Classical poets within broader cultural and historical frames.
Introduction: Aegina in Contexts,David Fearn I. Contexts for Heroic Myth-Making: Ethnicity, Interstate Relations, Cult, and Commerce 1. Asopos and his Multiple Daughters: Traces of Preclassical Epic in the Aeginetan Odes of Pindar,Gregory Nagy 2. Rethinking the Sanctuary of Aphaia,James Watson 3. 'The Thearion of the Pythian One': The Aeginetan Thearoi in Context,Ian Rutherford 4. Musical Merchandise 'on every vessel': Religion and Trade on Aegina,Barbara Kowalzig II. Poetry, Performance, Politics 5. Aeginetan Epinician Culture: Naming, Ritual, and Politics,David Fearn 6. Aeginetan Odes, Reperformance, and Intertextuality,Andrew Morrison III. Interfaces between Poetry, Myth, and Art 7. Giving Wings to the Aeginetan Sculptures: The Panhellenic Aspirations of Pindar's Eighth Olympian,Lucia Athanassaki 8. Thebes, Aegina, and the Temple of Aphaia: A Reading of Pindar's Isthmian 6,Henrik Indergaard 9. The Trojan War, Theoxenia, and Aegina in Pindar's Paean 6 and the Aphaia Sculptures,lóÇ