Dithyramb


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

The dithyramb was originally an ancient Greek hymn (διθύραμβος - dithurambos) sung to the god Dionysus and was also a term used as an epithet of the god.[1]. Its wild and ecstatic character was contrasted by Plutarch[2] with that of the paean. Dithyrambos seems to have arisen out of this song: just as paean was both a hymn to and a title of Apollo, Dithyrambos was an epithet of Dionysus as well as a song in his honor. Greeks recognized in the epithet "he of the miraculous birth" and constructed an etymology to confirm this.[3] According to Aristotle, the dithyramb was the origin of the Ancient Greek theatre, and one may recognize as a dithyramb the chorus invoking Dionysus in Euripides' The Bacchae.[4] Plato, in The Laws, discussing various kinds of music, mentions "the birth of Dionysos, called, I think, the dithyramb".[5]

Contents

Form

The dithyramb was described by A.W. Pickard-Cambridge as

an antistrophic composition, dealing with special themes taken from divine and heroic legend, but still maintaining its particular connexion with Dionysus, who is celebrated, apparently at or near the opening of the song, whatever its subject[6]

Richard Hamilton notes that all of Pindar's odes, like all of Greek lyric until the late 5th century BCE, with the exception of satyr plays, are written in strophes, or stanzas.[7] The ancient Greeks themselves counted among the special criteria of the dithyramb its special rhythm, its flute accompaniment in Phrygian mode,[8] its highly wrought vocabulary, its considerable narrative content and its originally antistrophic character.[9]

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 leader of the chorus later became the solo protagonist, with lyrical interchanges taking place between him and the rest of the chorus.

Competitions between groups singing 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 choragos. The results of dithyrambic contests in Athens were recorded with the names of the winning teams and choregoi recorded but not the poets, most of whom remain unknown. The successful choregos would receive a statue which would be erected - at his own expense - on a public monument to commemorate his group's victory.

History

The first dithyrambs were composed in Athens around the seventh century BC. 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;[10] the word is of unknown but probably non-Greek derivation.[11] 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.[12] According to Aristotle, it evolved into the Greek tragedy, and dithyrambs continued to be developed alongside tragedies for some time. The clearest sense of dithyramb as proto-tragedy comes from a surviving dithyramb by Bacchylides 1 2, though it was composed after tragedy had already developed more fully. As a dialogue between a single actor and a chorus, it is suggestive of what tragedy may have resembled before Aeschylus added a second actor. By the 4th century BC 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 Alexander's Feast by John Dryden, written in 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.

A wildly enthusiastic speech or piece of writing is still occasionally described as dithyrambic. Contemporary American poet David Wojahn's poem "Dithyramb and Lamentation," from his 2006 collection Interrogation Palace, is an innovative take on the form, featuring sections with such titles as "Email" and "George W. Bush in Hell."

Footnotes

  1. ^ Dithurambos, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, at Perseus
  2. ^ Plutarch, On the Ei at Delphi. Plutarch himself was a priest of Dionysus at Delphi.
  3. ^ Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd ed. 1922:436
  4. ^ Bacchae 419ff, translated and quoted in this context by Harrison 1922:436.
  5. ^ Plato, Laws, iii.700 B.
  6. ^ Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy, as revised by T.B.L. Webster (Oxford University Press, 1962:24), quoted, and criticised, by Richard Hamilton, "The Pindaric Dithyramb" Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 93 (1990:211-222) p. 211, as "the authoritative treatment".
  7. ^ Hamilton 1990:212.
  8. ^ Aristotle records the failed attempt to set it in Dorian mode, in politics 8.7 (noted by W. M. Calder, "The Dithyramb: An Anatolian Dirge" The Classical Review 36.1/2 (February/March 1922:11-14) p. 11, note 3.
  9. ^ A.E. Harvey, "The classification of Greek lyric poetry", Classical Quarterly 5 (1955).
  10. ^ Herodotus, I.23.
  11. ^ 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 linguisticunderstanding (Harrison 1922:441).
  12. ^ * Feder, Lillian, The Handbook of Classical Literature, (uniform title: Meridian Handbook of Classical Literature), New York : Da Capo Press, 1998. ISBN 0306808803. Cf. article on "Arion", p.48.

References

  • Aristotle, Poetics
  • Francis, Eric David, and Vickers, Michael J., Image and Idea in Fifth Century Greece, Routledge, 1990, ISBN 0415019141. See Chapter 3, "Word and Ceremony", pp.43-66.
  • Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur Wallace
    • Dithyramb, Tragedy, and Comedy , 1927, revised edition 1962.
    • The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, 1946.
    • The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 1953.
  • Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane, Tragedy and Athenian Religion, Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Trypanis, C.A. (1981). Greek Poetry from Homer to Seferis. University of Chicago Press. 
  • Wiles, David, The Masked Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance, 1991.

See also

External links

Sister project Look up dithyramb in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.






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