The interconnectedness of two linguistic registers, the ‘vernacular’ and the ‘morethan- local’ or ‘pan-Hellenic’, is a well-known characteristic of the Kunstsprache of Greek lyric. The two case-studies considered in this paper, Pindar’s Olympian 1 and a roughly contemporary Boeotian stone-epigram of ‘local’ production (CEG 114) exemplify opposite poles within the spectrum of linguistic possibilities available to Greek archaic and classical poets and their audiences.
