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as a thanksgiving if the danger was averted.12 It had many different manifestations. While most often addressed to Apollo (with whom the originally independent divine saviour Paia(wo)n was commonly identified), it could on occasion be addressed to other gods, or even to powerful men, in whom salvation lay. Though usually sung in chorus, it could be sung by a soloist. It might be delivered by voices alone, or accompanied by the lyre or the pipes, according to circumstances. It might take the form of a dancing processional,13 but more often it was performed dancing on the spot or standing still14 |
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The dithyramb, although in principle dedicated to a god, Dionysus, has an altogether less holy feel to it, and in many cases it appears to have become virtually secularized. It is first mentioned by Archilochus as the 'lovely song of lord Dionysus' that the wine-blitzed reveller may begin and his companions take up. This sounds like a spontaneous act of merrymaking that might break out on any night of the week. But normally we hear of dithyrambs only as institutionalized festival events. What form they took in the Archaic period is a matter for conjecture. It is certainly tempting to suppose that at least some of the various costumed groups of dancers who appear in archaic vase-painting from several regions, some of them crowned with ivy and accompanied by a piper, were performers of dithyrambs.15 By the late sixth century BC, if not before, the composition of dithyrambs for city festivals had been taken up by leading musicians such as Lasus and Simonides. The dithyramb now was both a spectacle and a sophisticated art form, no mere alcoholic knees-up (if that is what it had been formerly) but a genre as articulate and intellectually demanding as any other put before the public. The Athenians seem to have had a fair appetite for them: the spectator at the City Dionysia in the spring could see as many as twenty, presented by men's and boys' choruses from each of the ten official tribes, with prizes awarded for the best. Each chorus was fifty strong, |
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12 Deliverance from plague: Il. 1. 472-4 (after), Soph. OT 5, 186 (before). A total eclipse: Pind. Paean 9. An earthquake: Xen. Hell. 4. 7. 4. Aristoxenus (fr. 117) recorded an occasion when, to cure an outbreak of craziness among the women of Locri and Rhegium, the oracle demanded the singing of twelve paeans a day for sixty days, 'which resulted in the appearance of many paean-writers in Italy'. |
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13Hymn. Horn. Ap. 514ff. |
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14 On the paean generally see H. W. Smyth, Greek Melic Poets (London, 1904), pp. xxxvi-xlii; L. Deubner, Neue Jahrb. 22 (1919), 385-406; A. von Blumenthal, RE xviii. 2340-62. |
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15 See Pl. 3; Pickard-Cambridge. DTC2 80, 96, 100f.; Webster, 17, 26, 29f., etc. |
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