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At Thebes there was one that performed at a nocturnal festival of the Mother of the Gods.20 We saw that Pindar imagined the Hyperboreans as comfortably provided with girls' choruses. He himself, like Simonides and Bacchylides, composed partheneia, perhaps for more than one city.21 The fact that the most eminent poets applied themselves to such business, or were commissioned for it, shows the importance attached to attaining the highest artistic quality in these girls' choral performances. |
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In general, the music and dancing associated with religious ceremonies were designed above all to give pleasure to the onlookers. Only at the climactic moment of sacrifice did a solemn or reverential mood prevail. For the rest, the atmosphere was festive. In 480 BC a Megarian poet prayed to Apollo to keep the Persians away from his city, |
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so the people in good cheer
when spring arrives may bring you splendid hecatombs,
delighting in the banquet and the lyre
and paean-dances round your altar, and glad cries.22 |
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Not everything had to be subordinated to the god's needs. A paean or dithyramb might contain much that had little relevance to the deity being honoured. And with a crowd gathered in holiday spirits, it is not surprising that the musical entertainments sometimes proliferated. The rhapsodes who were skilled in the singing of Homer and other epic narrative would naturally be attracted to the scene and eager to earn money by performing; a prefatory hymn to the god of the festival would be sufficient accommodation to the occasion. The same applies, more or less, to those who practised the more distinctly musical arts of singing to or playing the kithara or the pipes. There were current in Antiquity a number of citharodes' prefatory hymn's,23 collectively ascribed to the famous seventh-century cithar- |
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20 Pind. Pyth. 3.78. |
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21 It should be noted that the term partheneion, which merely indicates that the performers were girls but says nothing about the occasion, may overlap with such terms as prosodion and paean. |
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22 'Theog.' 776-9. The poet may be the Philiadas of Megara who composed an epitaph for the men from Thespiae who fell at Thermopylae (D. L. Page, Epigrarmmatica Graeca (Oxford, 1975), 40). |
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23 A citharode is one who sings accompanying himself on the kithara, whereas a citharist is one who simply plays the instrument. Similarly an aulode sings to pipe accompaniment, an aulete plays the pipes. |
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