Sunday, 23 August 2015

Dithyramb

A Dithyramb was a type of Greek choral hymn that told a story, usually about gods and heroes. It was performed by a chorus of 50 dancers and singers, often accompanied by music and dancing. Dithyrambs were popular entertainment and served an educational purpose, teaching people about Greek mythology and culture. They were known for their emotional intensity and vivid imagery. Dithyrambs were hugely popular with their audiences.
Dithyrambs could also tell stories about epics, but they usually concentrated on a single episode or event from the epic, rather than telling the entire story. Dithyrambs were also more emotional and intense than epics, and they often used more vivid imagery.

A dithyramb was a type of Greek choral hymn that was often performed as a circular dance, a thiasos. The dancers and singers would circle around the altar of the god Dionysos, the thymele, symbolising the cyclical nature of life and death. The Dithyramb was technically a song of the birth of Dionysos, and the birth of Dionysos was in the spring, the time of the Great Dionysian festival in Athens. The Dithyramb was a hymn to Dionysos.

The circular dance was also a way for the participants to connect with the god Dionysos as the chorus of dancers could exhibit the god's wild and ecstatic energy with their dancing.

The dithyramb could be considered to be a precursor of the satyr play. The satyr play is a type of Greek drama that was performed after a trilogy of tragedies at the City Dionysia festival. Satyr plays were typically comic and often parodied the stories and characters of tragedies.

Herodotus (i, 23) ascribes Arion (fl. 628-625 B.C.) as the inventor of the dithyramb, [Solon seems to confirm this view in his poem entitled Elegies] though the dithyramb may have been invented many decades before. Nonetheless, Arion of Methymna [Lesbos] was clearly an important figure in its history. He found a patron in the person of Periander, Tyrant of Corinth. He composed them himself and taught Corinthian choirs to perform them. He seems to have made it formal and stationary and to have given his poems titles with definite subjects. Suidas connects him with the birth of tragedy, but this probably means no more than that his type of dithyramb helped eventually to produce tragedy.

Herodotus History Book 1 - Clio 23

23. This Periander, who apprised Thrasybulus of the oracle, was son of Cypselus, and tyrant of Corinth. In his time a very wonderful thing is said to have happened. The Corinthians and the Lesbians agree in their account of the matter. They relate that Arion of Methymna, who as a player on the harp, was second to no man living at that time, and who was, so far as we know, the first to invent the dithyrambic measure, to give it its name, and to recite in it at Corinth, was carried to Taenarum on the back of a dolphin.


Arion was said to be the first

1. To use and train choruses
2. To sing dithyrambs and call them by that name
3. To costume members of the chorus as satyrs and provide them with verses to deliver before an audience.
4. To give the chorus the name of what was being sung
5. To employ the tragic mode.

Arion, if he existed, may have raised the status of the dithyramb to that of an art form, widening the scope of its subject matter as a Dionysiac cult song, and giving the choral song and dance a more serious tone.

Dithyramb was a song and a dance performed by a chorus accompanied by an aulos with as many as 50 young boys or men in the Chorus team. Plutarch described dithyrambs as having a wild and ecstatic character: members of the chorus were dressed as satyrs with greatly enlarged and exaggerated and erect phalluses. It was danced and sung in honour of Dionysos. Dithyrambs were mainly celebrated in ancient Athens in Autumn around the time of the harvest festival. Dionysos was the god of the grape, wine and the vine. It took the form of performances given at the Dionysian festivals. It was described as a song and dance which required plenty of wine to get it going. Dithyrambs were associated with Dionysos from an early time, mentioned at least from the first half of the seventh-century bc. They were regularly performed at the main Dionysian festivals in Athens, particularly at the Great Dionysia. Prizes were offered later, a bull to the poet, to the best team and their tribe a tripod was awarded.

The word "dithyrambic" comes from the Greek word "dithyrambos," which means "a hymn to Dionysus." In ancient Greece, dithyrambs were wild, irregular, and dissonant poems that were sung and danced in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility. The word "dithyrambic" is now used to describe any speech or writing that is wildly enthusiastic or passionate. 

Each tribe was required to provide one chorus of men and one of the boys, each consisting of 50 singers. The financing of the enterprise (payment for the poet, the trainer of the chorus (chorodidaskalos), and the pipe-player (aulete); and the cost of equipping the chorus) was the responsibility of the chorēgos (financial sponsor).

Dithyrambs were performed at the following Athenian festivals: the City or Great Dionysia, the Thargelia, the (Lesser) Panathenaea, the Prometheia, and the Hephaestia. In Classical Athens, dithyrambic choruses became a competitive art form as did the performances of Ancient Greek dramatic plays.

Some ascribe the origins of the dithyramb and its evolution from the Bacchanalian orgies at which drunken and ecstatic singing and dancing took place by entranced maenads [the handmaidens of Dionysos] holding thrysi chased by satyrs with greatly enlarged and exaggerated and erect phalluses. One can see depictions of this on the many hundreds of the vases and pots which have survived from this period.

A traditional ecstatic dance performed in south east Italy known as the Tarantella [Notte della Taranta Apulia (Puglia) Italy] may have originally been a Bacchanalian dance. The dance of the Tarantella may well be a modern survival of this Bacchanalian rite where the women at these festivals drive themselves into an ecstatic frenzy quite possibly like the maenads of ancient times.

Plutarch described the dithyramb as being that as to Dionysos, as the paean was to Apollo. Dithyramb was one of the names or epiphets of Dionysos describing his double birth, but note that the song and dance of the dithyramb was not a re-enactment of the myth of Dionysos.

Dithyrambs were celebrated at Delphi during the three winter months sacred to Dionysos. Indeed there was a close association between the festivals of Dionysos and Apollo at Delphi. And also at the Thargelia festival in Athens. At Delos sacred missions of teams of dancers composed of young boys and/or old men were sent across from Athens by rich sponsors [choregai] to compete at the Apollonia festival there:

The people at large found the dithyrambic dances very appealing as the songs and music were always upbeat. They were very popular and enthusiastic in nature. The words, rhythm and music were not at all solemn like the paeans sung to Apollo.

Ridgeway considered the god Dionysos (half goat half man) as a hero, and he was regarded by the Greek peoples as a kind of saint, hence he was a god to the people and consequently enjoyed a huge cult. Dionysos was a chthonic power and vegetation god possibly associated with the dead. The heroine was his mother Semele, and the dithyramb was name of both the song and dance as well as the god himself.

Dithyrambs were sung and danced to music composed or improvised in the Phrygian mode, played on an aulos as the accompanying instrument.

The music was originally orgiastic and passionate in nature, as it originated from a Bacchic revel. Over time its wildness may have tempered. The music was set to poetry: indeed it was the poet who hired the aulos player.

Kyklos xoros meant the chorus danced in a circle. Etymologists derive the word dithyramb, not a Greek word, as meaning four steps. One is reminded of the kolo dances in Serbia and the surrounding Balkan region.  Indeed, the proper term for a dithyrambic chorus is a cyclic chorus. Others derive the term dithyramb from dios thrambos or the triumph [revel] of the god [of wine].



References

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ARION An ancient Greek bard and great master on the cithara, was a native of  Methymna in Lesbos, and, according to some accounts, a son of Cyclon or of Poseidon and the  nymph Oncaea. He is called the inventor of the  dithyrambic poetry, and of the name dithyramb.  (Herod, i. 23; Schol. ad Find. 01. xiii. 25.) All  traditions about him agree in describing him as a  contemporary and friend of Periander, tyrant of  Corinth, so that he must have lived about b.c. 700. He appears to have spent a great part of his  life at the court of Periander, but respecting his  life and his poetical or musical productions,  scarcely anything is known beyond the beautiful  story of his escape from the sailors with whom he sailed from Sicily to Corinth. On one occasion,  thus runs the story, Arion went to Sicily to take  part in some musical contest. He won the prize,  and, laden with presents, he embarked in a Corinthian ship to return to his friend Periander. The rude sailors coveted his treasures, and meditated his murder. Apollo, in a dream, informed his beloved bard of the plot After having tried in vain  to save his life, he at length obtained permission  once more to seek delight in his song and playing  on the cithara. In festal attire he placed himself  in the prow of the ship and invoked the gods in  inspired strains, and then threw himself into the  sea. But many song-loving dolphins had assembled round the vessel, and one of them now took the bard on its hack and earned him to Taenarus, from whence he returned to Corinth in safety, and related his adventure to Periander. When the Corinthian vessel arrived likewise, Periander inquired of the sailors after Arion, and they said that he had remained behind at Tarentum ; but when Arion, at the bidding of Periander, came forward, the sailors owned their guilt and were punished according to their desert. In the time of Herodotus and Pausanias there existed on Taenarus a brass monument, which was dedicated there either by Periander or Arion himself, and which represented him riding on a dolphin. Arion and his cithara (lyre) were placed among the stars.


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Bell Krater Vase Red-Figure
Decoration:
A: THEATRICAL, DITHYRAMB, CHORUS, DRAPED MEN SINGING, AND YOUTH PLAYING PIPES, POST WITH IVY

B: DRAPED SATYR WITH TORCH, WOMEN (MAENADS) WITH THYRSOS

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The Structure Of Greek Tragedy - D.J. Mastronarde
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