Pindar's nemein

Pindar, one of the greatest poets of the ancient world, was born of a noble family between c. 522 and 518 bc at Cynoscephalae, near Thebes, the capital of Boeotia in central Greece. He never, so far as we know, describes himself as a poet. Instead, he does, on occasion, call himself a prophet (προϕάτας, prophatas; Pae. 6.6; fr. 150). This may approximate, to an extent, the manner of a poet, in that the poetic and the prophetic were closely identified in the fifth century BC. He was trained in music in Athens (in the flute and the lyre) and he later became a professional composer of lyrics (hymns, partheneia, dithyrambs, paeans, hyporchēmata, encomia, dirges and odes). His work, comprising at least seventeen books, once collected at the great library at Alexandria, is largely lost to us. Only four of these books survive today, along with various fragments preserved by scholiasts and later authors’ quotations, and through the work of archaeologists at the excavations near Oxyrhynchus (modern El-Bahnasa) in Egypt, who discovered papyri containing remnants of Pindar's work at an ancient rubbish dump.

I begin by examining the key instances of the nemein/nemō family of words and the related, which are of particular interest in the Boeotian poet. The use of the verb nemō, in the sense of ‘watching over’ or ‘keeping’, is, for example, met with in O. 2.12, ὦ Κρόνιϵ παῖ Ῥέας, ἕδος Ὀλύμπου νέμων [nemōn] (and also in O. 3.36; 10.13; 13.27; Isthm. 1.67; P. 3.70). In the sense of ‘to cultivate’ and possibly ‘to inhabit fields of land’, we find the verb used in P. 4.150: ἀγρούς τϵ πάντας, τοὺς ἀπούρας ἁ μϵτέρων τοκέων νέμϵαι [nemeai] (also in O. 9.27); and in P. 11.55, where dwelling peacefully [nemomenos] in the marshes is said to avoid hubris: τίς ἄκρον ἑλὼν ἡσυχᾷ τϵ νϵμόμϵνος [nemomenos] αἰνὰν ὕβριν ἀπέϕυγϵν. In the further sense of ‘directing or placing’ parts of the body, in particular the feet, we read in N. 6.15: ἴχνϵσιν ἐν Πραζιδάμαντος ἑὸν πόδα νέμων [nemōn] (also met with in Isthm. 2.22).