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Updated: April 30, 2025
When the bacchantes were out on Mount Cithaeron, and the mad Evoe! Evoe! rang through the moonstruck woods, be sure he was up and away, with ardent hands clutched in the flying tresses. Ah! the vine leaves and the tiger skins and the ivory bodies, the clash of the cymbals and the dithyramb shrilling up to the stars! "If I forget thee, O golden Aphrodite!"
Whence were revealed the new graces of Dionysos with the dithyramb that winneth the ox ? Who made new means of guidance to the harness of horses, or on the shrines of gods set the twin images of the king of birds ? Among them thriveth the Muse of dulcet breath, and Ares in the young men's terrible spears.
This choral song belonged to the class of the dithyramb, an enthusiastic ode to Bacchus, capable of expressing every variety of feeling excited by the worship of that god. It was first sung by revelers at convivial meetings, afterwards it was regularly executed by a chorus.
As at the entertainments which Hadrian was accustomed to give in Rome, first of all short selections from new essays or poems were recited by their authors, then a gay comedy was performed; then Glycera, the most famous singer in the city, had sung a dithyramb to her harp, in a voice as sweet as a bell, and Alexander, a skilled performer on the trigonon, had executed a piece.
Some of them expressed the sufferings of Dionysus; and it was from this more mournful species of dithyramb that tragedy, properly so called, arose. The dithyrambic odes formed a kind of lyrical tragedy, and were sung by a chorus of fifty men, dancing round the altar of Dionysus.
Dithyrambs, or wild and exulting songs, at first extemporaneous, celebrated the triumphs of the god. By degrees, the rude hymn swelled into prepared and artful measures, performed by a chorus that danced circling round the altar; and the dithyramb assumed a lofty and solemn strain, adapted to the sanctity of sacrifice and the emblematic majesty of the god.
Greek poetry had hitherto enjoyed a peculiarly free development, each form of art succeeding each without break or pause, because each epic, lyric, dithyramb, the drama had responded to some new need of the state and of religion. Now in the years that followed the fall of Athens and the conquests of Macedonia, Greek religion and the Greek state had ceased to be themselves.
What means, then, this dithyramb upon property? "The right of property is the most important of human institutions."... Yes; as monarchy is the most glorious. "The original cause of man's prosperity upon earth." Because justice was supposed to be its principle.
I cherish the fancy that Port speaks the sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode. Or put it, that Port is the Homeric hexameter, Burgundy the pindaric dithyramb. What do you say?" "The comparison is excellent, sir." "The distinction, you would remark. Pindar astounds. But his elder brings us the more sustaining cup. One is a fountain of prodigious ascent.
Then she began to sing, at first in single isolated words and exclamations, which constantly swelled into more powerful, animated and blissful tones, and finally flowed into a regular dithyramb.
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