Fashioners of Poetic Drinks: The Inherited Background of Pindar’s Nemean 3 Metapoetic Metaphors

I focus on the structure and two metaphors of Pindar’s Nemean 3. After drawing attention to lexical and semantic repetitions of the ode, I concentrate on the image of the ‘craftsmen of honey-voiced revels’ (vv. 4-7) and that of the ‘drink to sing on’ (vv. 77-79). I propose that these two metaphors, placed at separate but complementary points in the poem (i.e. near the beginning and the end), are found combined together in other Indo-European traditions: craftsmen-deities of the Vedic pantheon, such as the Rbhus or Tvaṣṭar are said to be craftsmen of poetic or ritual drinks; Old Norse kennings, connected with the myth of the dwarfs, consist of/contain the same images.