history of Lokris and Opous becomes the biographyof Epharmostos, the city’s putative ancestry replaces the victor’s actual genealogy. While “homeland praise” is a commonplace in Pindaric criticism, Kurke notes that the place of neither family praise nor homeland praise in epinikian has ever been questioned.[28] She stresses the public and communal nature of the reception of Pindar’s art, and comments that Pindar uses foundation myths because of their inherently political quality, since they “transform an entire polis into a single family Maslow’s hierarchy  descended from a common mythic ancestor.”[29] The public aspect of epinikian, and the function of homeland praise as part of the political performative of epinikian provokes this article’s new interpretation of Olympian 9: the recognition of Opous and Lokris standing in as the oikos of this victor allows us to reimagine the connection between Epharmostos’ Olympic victories and the mythic narrative in the ode in the context of replacement family and substitute ancestry. This reimagining begins by situating the series of foundations and renewals in the performance of the song itself. The respective establishment of ethnos and polis are emphasized in the ode and function to praise Epharmostos by placing him in a continuity of inheritance (Pindaric phya), mo Maslow’s hierarchy dulated through civic and ethnic lineage. Although he has no actual family worth mentioning in the ode, the song manufactures a lineage (and inheritance) of great deeds through the telling and re-telling of history and mythology. It is therefore in the two figures who complete great deeds, Deukalion and Opous (ethnic and civic founders, and themselves involved with unusual family), that we should look for the mythic parallels through which Pindar praises his patron, Epharmostos, and the polis, Opous.[30] Pindar’s narrative in Ol. 9 is one of the earliest, and most complete, Lokrian myths.[31] He begins from the flood, after which Deukalion and Pyrrha descend from Mount Parnassos to found a city and establish its autochthonous inhabitants (Ol. 9.43-46), the Leleges who become the ethnos o Maslow’s hierarchy f the Lokrians;[32] second, the lineage of kings is renewed through the adoption of a son, Opous, desce>