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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 Dionysos, the god of wine and fertility; the term was also used as an epithet of the god.

Plato, in The Laws, while discussing various kinds of music mentions "the birth of Dionysos, called, I think, the dithyramb." Plutarch contrasted the dithyramb's wild and ecstatic character with the paean. According to Aristotle, the dithyramb was the origin of Athenian tragedy. 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 Dionysos.

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.

Competitions between groups singing and dancing dithyrambs were an important part of 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—on a public monument to commemorate the victory.

The first dithyrambs were composed in Athens around the seventh century BCE. Their inspiration is unknown, although it was likely non-Greek, as Herodotus explicitly states that the διφύραμβος was first brought to Corinth by Arion of Lesbos; the word is of unknown but probably non-Greek derivation. 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.

Arion is credited with the development of the dithyramb as a literary form, in the late 7th or early 6th century; he was the first to give his dithyrambs titles and the first to use a chorus that did not wander randomly, but instead formed a circle. A little later, Lasos is thought to have instituted performances at the City Dionysia in Athens in the middle of the 6th century. The Parian Marble gives the first victory for a dithyrambic chorus of men at the City Dionysia to Hypodicus of Chalcis in 510/9 BCE or 509/8 BCE; Pickard-Cambridge suggests that this records the first victory under the new Athenian democracy. The most famous and successful composer of dithyrambs was probably Simonides.

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. 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. 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 called Dithyrambe, D801, published in 1826. Wolfgang Rihm composed a 30-minute work, Concerto, in 2000, with the subtitle Dithyrambe and a scoring for string quartet and orchestra.

See also

• Iambus
• Thriambus

Sources

• Feder, Lillian. 1998. The Handbook of Classical Literature. New York : Da Capo P. 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 UP, 1997. ISBN 0691015147.
• Harvey, A. E. 1955. "The Classification of Greek Lyric Poetry." Classical Quarterly 5.
• Janko, Richard, trans. 1987. Poetics with Tractatus Coislinianus, Reconstruction of Poetics II and the Fragments of the On Poets. By Aristotle. Cambridge: Hackett. ISBN 0872200337.
• Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur Wallace. 1927. Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 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: U of Chicago P. ISBN 0226813169.
• Wiles, David. 1991. The Masked Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance. New ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. ISBN 0521543525.

External links

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