"Son of Tantalos, against former ones I will tell of thee", Pindar formulates confidently in the first Olympian ode, and in the same song also distinguishes between true stories and false, colourful myths. But not only Pelops, but also Heracles, Asclepius and many other notable heroes of Greek mythology are portrayed differently in Pindars texts than in the "usual" narrative variants we know today.

The dissertation project explores the question of how Pindar develops his own way of narrating a myth in his odes out of dependence on the pre-texts that are authoritative for him. Who are the models from which he so explicitly turns away? Which myths does he choose for his texts? How do his myth variants differ from the pre-texts? What altered statements do his myth corrections arrive at and what effect do they have on the further reception of the myths?

In order to answer these numerous questions satisfactorily, a corpus of the mythical narratives in Pindar's Odes will be compiled that is as extensive as possible. The texts of the corpus will be analysed in the form of a complex database so that Pindar's variants can be compared with possible pre-texts or pictorial representations that could have been authoritative for Pindar. The database of pre-texts is supplemented by a database of metatexts by Pindar's contemporaries (e.g. Bacchylides, Aeschylus, ...) or successors (e.g. Appollodorus, Hyginus, ...), from which conclusions can be drawn about Pindar's narrative variants.

By comparing the material and thematic elements of the myth, as well as the choice of words and narrative structure, the components of Pindar's myth variants are filtered into established and corrected elements in order to be able to describe the heteronomy and autonomy of the text precisely. Pindar's approach becomes visible through this procedure, and previous research assumptions about religious or social statements of Pindar's texts can be reassessed.

Most of the myths Pindar worked on have already been studied as singular phenomena or in their relationship to literary models such as Homer or Hesiod. This work now attempts to look at the entire relationship of Pindar's reworkings to their models, and to sound out their position between textual dependence and independence.