This dissertation argues that Pindar’s epinician odes, composed in the first half of the fifth century BCE, functioned as both ideology and practice in attempting to stabilize, legitimize, and perpetuate the social status of Pindar’s patrons and their families. It reads the extant epinician odes as the evidence of sociocultural practices and discourses of the fifth century BCE, and shows that predecessors, contemporaries, and later receivers of Pindaric epinician in antiquity saw the practice of athletic commemoration and epinician poetry itself as participants in fundamental sociopolitical discourses with high stakes for the well-being of social communities. A critical contemporary role of this poetic form was to naturalize the potentially unstable statuses of elites across the Greek world, under a variety of forms of political organization. In order to argue that the social status of elites was both naturally legitimate and diachronically durable, the epinicians represent inborn arete as a ground for physical ability, health, and achievement, which is equated with social and moral value. They consistently narrativize sexuality and childbirth as subject to a system of social regulation and surveillance that supports a narrow definition of reproductive norms and the importance of both material and social inheritance. In their self-conscious reference to their own composition and performance, the poems represent themselves as active participants in, and creators of, the norms of a restricted elite social discourse that both limits and defines the possible investments of their potential audiences. In the metaphors that the odes use to describe their victors, their own nature as cultural products, and the relationship of the poet to his laudandi, the poet and his poems are embedded in contemporary social institutions that served elite interests and interconnections. Ultimately, the odes strive to create an audience that is invested in their own reproduction and perpetuation, alongside the social institutions and forms on which their value system relies.