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dancing in circular formation with its piper in the middle. Thus every year a thousand citizens performed in dithyrambs at that festival. |
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This was by no means the only occasion in the Athenian calendar for male choruses to perform. They are attested for the Anthesteria (February-March), Thargelia (May-June), Panathenaea (July-August), Hephaestea and Promethia (date uncertain), and there were also the dramatic contests at the winter Lenaea and the City Dionysia, in which choral song and dance, and also lyric dialogue between actor and chorus (and, after Aeschylus, solo arias), had an established place. This musical element was by no means merely incidental to classical drama, but an important factor in its total impact. Aeschylus' older contemporary Phrynichus was remembered with affection two generations after his death not for the power of his plots but for the sweetness of his melodies and the resourcefulness of his choreography. Aristophanes in his critique of Aeschylus and Euripides in his Frogs devotes special attention to their music. Some of the Athenian survivors of the military disaster at Syracuse in 413 BC are said to have obtained food and water because they were able to sing portions of Euripides, and there is a story of the choral entry from his Electra being sung by a man at a dinner of Peloponnesian generals in 404.16 |
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Girls' choruses could also provide a public spectacle. Homer tells of a girl who aroused the lust of Hermes as he saw her singing and dancing in a chorus in honour of Artemis.17 At Sparta in the late seventh century there were festivals at which girls sang beautiful songs composed for them by Alcman. In the best-preserved specimen of these so-called partheneia, the religious ceremonies are mentioned only briefly; the main emphasis falls on the chorus-members themselves, their finery, and their girlish feelings. About three generations later the author of the Delian Hymn to Apollo describes the god's festival on Delos, to which people bring their families from all over Ionia. There is boxing, dancing, song, and best of all is the chorus of local maidens, who sing hymns to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto, and also heroic myths.18 At Delphi too, the other great national centre of Apolline cult, there was a girls' chorus to sing his praises.19 |
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16 Plut. Nicias 29. 4, Lys. 15.4. G. Arrighetti, Satiro, Vita di Euripide (Pisa, 1964), 143, suggests Philochorus as Plutarch's source. |
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17Il.. 16. 182f. |
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18Hymn. Horn. Ap. 146-64; cf. Eur. Hec. 463, HF 687. Girls' choruses sent to Delos from the Cyclades: Strab. 10.5.2 p. 485. |
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19Hymn. Hom. 27. 11-20, Pind. Paean 2.97, 6. 16. |
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