Payback Time: Metamorphoses of Debt and Commodity in Pindar’s Olympian 10

The opening conceit of Pindar’s Olympian 10 revolves, unusually, around ideas of business and credit. The poet claims to have ‘forgotten’ his debt of an epinician ode and affirms that he is able to make up for the delay by repaying his debt with interest. The repayment Pindar offers is unsurpassably lavish, as it consists in nothing less than the conferment of (poetic) immortality on the recipient. Thus, the initial business transaction is integrated into a much broader network of non-material transactions implicating symbolic assets such as social value, prestige, and (crucially) immortality. This process of integration, or transvaluation, sublimates the transitoriness of market exchange into the permanence of generalized reciprocity, which embeds the material side of the transaction into the social, and de-commoditizes the ode by turning it into a vehicle of the aristocratic ethics of munificent rivalry. The transvaluation of the commodity-ode into the ode as symbolic capital is effected through a series of seeming paradoxes, which are however an essential aspect of what are two distinct but interrelated transactional orders. For a read-only version of the paper see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/greece-and-rome/article/payback-time-metamorphoses-of-debt-and-commodity-in-pindars-olympian-10/B019A59EEC90C4F231EF2ECABD2D1BAD/share/fdc956cfa29a3bd7a899736c2d7d8072b1f1fbb3