Adoption and Alterity in Pindar

"Adoption and Alterity in Pindar" uses the imagery of adoption in Pindar's poetry to examine his portrayal of alterity. It argues that narratives around heroic adoptions together with metaphors of adoption imply the importance of alterity to Pindar both as politics and poetics. Using both positive and negative portrayals of othered and adopted heroes and their monstrous counterparts, it complicates the traditional, aristocratic understanding of how Pindar conceptualizes human nature and excellence. Instead of something that is inherited and shared exclusively within a biologically determined kinship group, it argues that Pindar wants his readers to recognize that human excellence is something that grows synthetically—a composite, chimeric identity achieved through openness and acceptance of the unpredictable beauty that is an other.