Dithyrambus
（
διθύραμβος). A hymn sung at the festivals of Dionysus to
the accompaniment of a flute and a dance round the altar. (See
Dionysia.) The hymn celebrated the sufferings and actions of the god in a
style corresponding to the passionate character of his worship. In the course of time it
developed into a distinct kind of Greek lyric poetry. It was in Corinth that it first received
anything like a definite artistic form, and this at the hands of Arion , who was therefore
credited by the ancients with its actual invention. The truth probably is that he was the
first who divided the festal song of the chorus into strophe and antistrophe, and arrangement
from which tragedy took its rise. (See
Tragoedia.)
Dithyrambs were sung at Athens twice in the year—at the Great Dionysia in the spring
and at the Lenaea in the beginning of winter. The chorus consisted of fifty persons, who stood
in a circle round the altar. The dithyramb was further developed by Lasus of
Hermioné, the lyric poet and musician who lived about B.C. 520 at the court of the
Pisistratidae. By several innovations in music and rhythm, especially by a stronger and more
complete instrumentation, this artist gave it greater variety and a more secular character. He
also introduced the prize contests for the best dithyramb, and apparently
abolished the antistrophical division; at least this is not found in the dithyrambs of his
pupil Pindar. With Lasus and Pindar, Simonides and Bacchylides may be named as among the
foremost dithyrambic poets of their time. At the dithyrambic contests the poets of the
different tribes contended for the prize. Each had its chorus, brilliantly fitted out at great
expense by the richer citizens. Besides the honour of the victory the poet received a tripod;
the chorus, and the people which it represented, an ox for the sacrificial feast. These
performances were very popular for a long time; but, as the new tendency developed itself,
voices of authority made themselves heard, condemning them as involving a serious degeneracy
in art. There is, in fact, no doubt that in the form which it assumed after the time of the
Peloponnesian War the dithyramb did violence to the older taste. More and more it lost the
inner unity and beautiful proportion which that feeling required. A continuous and rapid
change of rhythm and mode was accompanied by an extraordinary boldness of diction, in keeping
with the wild character of the composition. In the hands of inferior poets this often passed
into turgidity and bombast, if not into mere nonsense. Solo pieces were inserted to relieve
the choruses, the text was gradually subordinated to the music, and the dithyramb was thus
gradually transformed into a kind of opera. Though the subjects of the poems had long ceased
to be taken exclusively from the cycle of Dionysiac myths, they were never, of course,
entirely out of harmony with the lyrical spirit of the dithyramb.
There was a very considerable number of dithyrambic poets. The best known are
Melanippides (q.v.) of Melos (about B.C. 415), who
is generally held responsible for the degeneracy of the dithyramb and the excess of
instrumental music; his disciple Philoxenus of Cythera, who died in 380; Timotheus of Miletus,
who died in 357, and his contemporaries Polyidus and Telestes. Of the whole literature we
possess nothing but fragments. See
Chorus;
Musica.
