The Gorgons’ Lament: Auletics, Poetics, and Chorality in Pindar’s Pythian 12

Abstract

This article offers a fresh reading of Pindar’s Pythian 12, an ode composed for a victorious aulete, which demonstrates its engagement in current musicological debates concerning innovations in instrumentation, relations between the musical and vocal elements in choreia , and the status of the pipes. In ways that intersect with these issues, Pindar anticipates a motif that resurfaces in later Attic drama and other texts concerning the origins of choral lyric and that identifies women’s lament as the prototypical form of song.