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. The dancers and singers would circle around the altar of the god Dionysus, symbolizing 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.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
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.
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
Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy (2nd edition): Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge - Internet Archive
Dithyramb in Context - Google Books
(B. Kowalzig, P. Wilson (edd.), Dithyramb in Context, Oxford University Press: Oxford 2013, Pp. xviii + 488, ills., ISBN 978-0-19- 957468-1. | Chara Kokkiou - Academia.edu
Choruses for Dionysus: Studies in the History of Dithyramb and Tragedy - Internet Archive
Nature, culture, and the origins of Greek comedy: Kenneth S., Rothwell, Jr. - Internet Archive
Page 138 Bacchylides: Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 - Volume 03 - Wikisource
Page 139 https://bit.ly/2LSct7l Page 140 https://bit.ly/3bU0bWr
Dithyramb - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
Arion Poems
Simonides of Ceos - Wikipedia
Pindar - Wikipedia
William Smith (1850). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Arion: Taylor and Walton. pp. 287– :-
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.
Deborah Lyons, Arion the Methymnian and Dionysos Methymnaios: Myth and Cult in Herodotus' Histories https://bit.ly/2X7QcbI
Armand D'Angour
The Classical Quarterly
Vol. 47, No. 2 (1997), pp. 331-351 (21 pages)
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
https://www.jstor.org/stable/639671
and . "Dithyramb." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press
The ancient use of the Greek accents in reading and chanting; with some newly restored Greek melodies : G. T. Carruthers - Internet Archive
[PDF] The Mystery of Dionysos and the Dithyramb Blog
Gunter Gebauer; Christoph Wulf (1995). Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society. University of California Press. pp. 34–. ISBN 978-0-520-08459-9.
A Companion to Friedrich Nietzsche: Life and Works
Edited by Paul Bishop
Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture
Volume: 114
Copyright Date: 2012
Published by: Boydell & Brewer, Camden House
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.cttn332r
The Size of the Greek Tragic Chorus
A. D. Fitton Brown
The Classical Review
Vol. 7, No. 1 (Mar., 1957), pp. 1-4
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/705995
The Origins of Greek Drama. A Summary of the Evidence and a Comparison with Early English Drama
Ierano, Il ditirambo di Dionisio. Le testimonianze. Poligrafici Internazionali, 1997. Pp. 428.
http://forum.index.hu/Article/viewArticle?a=85467713&t=9090023 http://goo.gl/X1AWh0
https://goo.gl/CmCW46
Karen Lüdtke (2009). Dances with Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy. Berghahn Books. pp. 59–. ISBN 978-1-84545-445-6.
Notte della Taranta - Wikipedia
Towards a History of Tonoi
Jon Solomon
The Journal of Musicology
Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer, 1984), pp. 242-251
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/763814
Phrygian mode - Wikipedia
M. L. West (1992). Ancient Greek Music. Clarendon Press. pp. 180–. ISBN 978-0-19-158685-9.
Aulos Player |
Aulos, an oboe-like reed wind instrument, often with two pipes.
Aulos - Wikipedia
. "Aulos." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/01532.
M. L. West (1992). Ancient Greek Music. Chapter 4: Wind and Percussion: Clarendon Press. pp. 81–. ISBN 978-0-19-158685-9.
On the Origin of the Dithyramb according to Herodotus and Pindar
Herodotus Delphi Complete Works of Herodotus (Illustrated). Book 1 Clio chapters 23-24 Story of Arion: Delphi Classics. pp. 26–. ISBN 978-1-909496-45-3.
Pindare (1970). Pindar. The Olympian and Pythian Odes. CUP Archive. pp. 128–.
Richard Stoneman (2013). Pindar. I.B.Tauris. pp. 60–. ISBN 978-1-78076-185-5.
On the Origin of Tragedy according to Aristotle
Aristotle ( 2013). Delphi Complete Works of Aristotle (Illustrated). Delphi Classics. pp. 3422–. ISBN 978-1-909496-28-6.
Aristotle; Richard Janko (1987). Aristotle: Poetics. 2. The Origins of Tragedy, Comedy and Epic: Hackett Publishing. pp. 4–. ISBN 0-87220-033-7.
Aristotle; Richard Janko (1987). Aristotle: Poetics. Noye to 49a10 Tragedy [arose] from the leaders of the Dithyramb: Hackett Publishing. pp. 77–. ISBN 0-87220-033-7.
Aristotle; Richard Janko (1987). Aristotle: Poetics. Note 13: Hackett Publishing. pp. 193–4. ISBN 0-87220-033-7.
Συγκεραυνόω: Dithyrambic Language and Dionysiac Cult
Daniel Mendelsohn
The Classical Journal
Vol. 87, No. 2 (Dec., 1991 - Jan., 1992), pp. 105-124
Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and South
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297967
Fiona Macintosh (2010). The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance. Staniewski's Secret Alphabet of Gestures: Dance, Body and Metaphysics: Oxford University Press. pp. 389–. ISBN 978-0-19-954810-1.
The Structure Of Greek Tragedy - D.J. Mastronarde
Archived
No comments:
Post a Comment