Alice Gaber: “A Chorus in Bronze and Gold: Unnatural Voices and Sacred Space in Pindar’s Paian B2”

Pindar’s Paian B2 (Rutherford = 8 Snell-Maehler) offers a rich layering of real and mythic choruses, including the enigmatic Keledones, a chorus comprised of manufactured, inanimate objects that adorns the mythic third temple of Apollo at Delphi, ecphrastically described as the centerpiece of the poem. This article, very much in progress, examines this sculptural chorus first by comparing these dancing, singing statues to other mythic choral paradigms (Muses, Sirens), productively complicating and nuancing our understanding of ancient chorality more broadly. My approach to the text then engages the methodological intersection of performance studies and narratology and thus adds to recent trends in scholarship on the ode concepts of unnatural and anti-mimetic narrative voice as well as materiality and embodiment in choral space.