Dithyramb

Attic relief (4th century BCE) depicting an aulos player and his family standing before Dionysos and a female consort, with theatrical masks displayed above.

The dithyramb (διθύραμβος – dithurambos) was an ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility; the term was also used as an epithet of the god:^[1] Plato, in The Laws, while discussing various kinds of music mentions "the birth of Dionysos, called, I think, the dithyramb."^[2] Plato also remarks in the Republic (394c) that dithyrambs are the clearest example of poetry in which the poet is the only speaker.

Plutarch contrasted the dithyramb's wild and ecstatic character with the paean.^[3] According to Aristotle, the dithyramb was the origin of Athenian tragedy.^[4] A wildly enthusiastic speech or piece of writing is still occasionally described as dithyrambic.

History

Dithyrambs were sung by choruses at Delos, but the literary fragments that have survived are largely Athenian. In Athens dithyrambs were sung by a Greek chorus of up to fifty men or boys dancing in circular formation (there is no certain evidence that they may have originally been dressed as satyrs) and probably accompanied by the aulos. They would normally relate some incident in the life of Dionysus.

The ancient Greeks themselves counted among the special criteria of the dithyramb its special rhythm, its aulos accompaniment in Phrygian mode, its highly-wrought vocabulary, its considerable narrative content, and its originally antistrophic character.^[5]

Competitions between groups singing and dancing dithyrambs were an important part of Dionysiac festivals such as the Dionysia and Lenaia. Each tribe would enter two choruses, one of men and one of boys, each under the leadership of a coryphaeus. The results of dithyrambic contests in Athens were recorded, with the names of the winning teams and their choregoi recorded, but not the poets, most of whom remain unknown. The successful choregos would receive a statue that would be erected—at his own expense—as a public monument to commemorate the victory.

The earliest mention of dithyramb found by Sir Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge,^[6] is in a fragment of Archilochus, who flourished in the first half of the seventh century BCE: "I know how to lead the fair song of the Lord Dionysus, the dithyramb, when my wits are fused with wine." As a literary composition for chorus, their inspiration is unknown, although it was likely Greek, as Herodotus explicitly speaks of Arion of Lesbos as "the first of men we know to have composed the dithyramb and named it and produced it in Corinth".^[7]

The word dithyramb is of unknown but probably non-Greek derivation.^[8] The form soon spread to other Greek city-states, and dithyrambs were composed by the poets Simonides and Bacchylides, as well as Pindar (the only one whose works have survived in anything like their original form).

Later examples were dedicated to other gods, but the dithyramb subsequently was developed (traditionally by Arion) into a literary form.^[9] According to Aristotle, Athenian tragedy developed from the dithyramb; the two forms developed alongside one another for some time. The clearest sense of dithyramb as proto-tragedy comes from a surviving dithyramb by Bacchylides, though it was composed after tragedy had already developed fully.^[10] As a dialogue between a solitary singer and a chorus, Bacchylides' dithyramb is suggestive of what tragedy may have resembled before Aeschylus added a second actor.

In the later 5th century BCE, the dithyramb "became a favorite vehicle for the musical experiments of the poets of the 'new music'."^[11] This movement included the poets Timotheus of Miletus, Cinesias, Melanippides, and Philoxenus of Cythera. By the 4th century BCE the genre was in decline, although the dithyrambic competitions did not come to an end until well after the Roman takeover of Greece.

Dithyrambic compositions are rare in English; one notable exception is John Dryden's Alexander's Feast (1697). Franz Schubert wrote a song for bass voice (D 801, published in 1826) on a text Dithyrambe, by Friedrich Schiller (1796). Wolfgang Rihm composed a 30-minute work, Concerto, in 2000, with the subtitle Dithyrambe and a scoring for string quartet and orchestra. Nietzsche composed a set of Dionysos-Dithyramben in 1889.

See also

• Iambus (genre)
• Thriambus

Notes

1. ^ Dithurambos, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, at Perseus. Dithyrambos seems to have arisen out of the hymn: just as paean was both a hymn to and a title of Apollo, Dithyrambos was an epithet of Dionysos as well as a song in his honour; see Harrison (1922, 436).
2. ^ Plato, Laws, iii.700 B.
3. ^ Plutarch, On the Ei at Delphi. Plutarch himself was a priest of Dionysos at Delphi.
4. ^ Aristotle, Poetics (1449a10–15): "Anyway, arising from an improvisatory beginning (both tragedy and comedy—tragedy from the leaders of the dithyramb, and comedy from the leaders of the phallic processions which even now continue as a custom in many of our cities), [tragedy] grew little by little, as [the poets] developed whatever [new part] of it had appeared; and, passing through many changes, tragedy came to a halt, since it had attained its own nature"; see Janko (1987, 6).
5. ^ Harvey (1955). Aristotle records the failed attempt to set it in Dorian mode, in his Politics (8.7).
6. ^ Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur Wallace. 1927. Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy. Second edition revised by T.B.L. Webster, 1962. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0198142277
7. ^ Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur Wallace. 1927. Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy. Second edition revised by T.B.L. Webster, 1962. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0198142277
8. ^ Herodotus, I.23; Euripides' (Bacchae 526ff) and Plato's (Laws, 700b, skeptically) derivation from di, "both" and thira, "door", suggestive of his double birth, does not stand up to modern linguistic understanding (Harrison 1922:441).
9. ^ Feder, (1998, 48).
10. ^ See USU.edu and UFL.edu.
11. ^ Christopher G. Brown, "Dithyramb," in N.G. Wilson (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, Routledge, 2006

Sources

• Feder, Lillian. 1998. The Handbook of Classical Literature. New York : Da Capo Press ISBN 0306808803.
• Francis, Eric David, and Michael J. Vickers. 1990. Image and Idea in Fifth-Century Greece. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415019141.
• Harrison, Jane Ellen. 1922. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. New ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. ISBN 0691015147.
• Harvey, A. E. 1955. "The Classification of Greek Lyric Poetry." Classical Quarterly 5.
• (Aristotle) Richard Janko, trans. 1987. Poetics with Tractatus Coislinianus, Reconstruction of Poetics II and the Fragments of the On Poets. Cambridge: Hackett. ISBN 0872200337.
• Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur Wallace. 1927. Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy. Second edition revised by T.B.L. Webster, 1962. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0198142277.
• —. 1946. The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens.
• —. 1953. The Dramatic Festivals of Athens.
• Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane. 2003. Tragedy and Athenian Religion. Oxford: Oxford UP.
• Trypanis, Constantine Athanasius. 1981. Greek Poetry from Homer to Seferis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226813169.
• Wiles, David. 1991. The Masked Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance. New ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 0521543525.

External links

• Bacchylides, "The Theseus Dithyramb" – composed c. 500 BCE