Alcman fr. 1

Alcman fr. 1 (Louvre Partheneion). Very difficult to summarize, but falls into two sections: 1-39, a mythic section on the children of Hippocoon; 39-101, where the chorus sings about two female figures, Agido and Hagesichora.

1) Every time I read this poem I'm reminded again how difficult it is: the dialect is tough, the fragmentary nature of the poem is tough, but the toughest part is that it just makes no sense. On a sentence by sentence level it's tough to understand the train of thought; and also the poem is constantly gesturing to its performance context, but in the absence of that context it's hard to understand the relationship between text and context. 

The poem asks "Don't you see?" (ἦ οὐχ ὁρῆις;) -- and of course I don't see, but would I have seen something at a 7th century performance in Sparta? Or is this all just a fiction? 

2) In contrast to its difficulty, I had completely forgotten about the myth that opens the fragment. Possibly just because the myth is very fragmentary and quite obscure -- Hippocoon is apparently a king of Sparta who drove out his brother Tyndareus (mortal father of the Dioscuri); later Heracles killed Hippocoon and his sons, and Tyndareus returned. 

It's also difficult to understand, but here it feels like the difficulty is just due to the fragmentary nature; the mix of narrative and gnomic statement feels a lot like epinician. The closing gnomai in particular feel like they could be straight from Pindar (except the dialectal form σιῶν):

ἔστι τις σιῶν τίσις· 
ὁ δ' ὄλβιος, ὅστις εὔφρων 
ἁμέραν [δι]απλέκει 
ἄκλαυτος·

Hard to see the relationship between the myth and the rest of the poem -- of course, that relationship is a classic problem in Pindar-land, so not a surprise it's tough here with even less to work with. 

3) One point of shared connection between the myth and the rest of the poem, though, is humility before the gods. I'm a little surprised then that there's no restraint for the praise of Hagesichora & Agido -- seems like a big difference from Pindar, who often restrains himself and creates a difference between praise for gods and mortals. 

Probably there's an obvious reason this is wrong, but I wonder whether Hagesichora & Agido are themselves goddesses -- sure, Hagesichora is χοραγὸς at 44, but e.g. the Antigone's chorus also call Dionysus χοραγός (1147). The hyperbolic praise for their choral leaders would seem more appropriate if those leaders were absent gods, a bit like praise for the absent Dionysus in that Antigone passage