Archaic and Classical Choral Song

Performance, Politics and Dissemination

Lucia Athanassaki, Ewen Lyall Bowie, Lucia Athanassaki, Ewen Lyall Bowie

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9783110254013
• eBook ISBN: 9783110254020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Literature

This book addresses the many interlocking problems in understanding the modes of performance, dissemination, and transmission of Greek poetry of the seventh to the fifth centuries BC whose first performers were a choral group, sometimes singing in a ritual context, sometimes in more secular celebrations of victories in competitive games. It explores the different ways such a group presented itself and was perceived by its audiences; the place of tyrants, of other prominent individuals and of communities in commissioning and funding choral performances and in securing the further circulation of the songs' texts and music; the social and political role of choral songs and the extent to which such songs continued to be performed both inside and outside the immediate family and polis-community, whether chorally or in archaic Greece's important cultural engine, the elite male symposium, with the consequence that Athenian theatre audiences could be expected to appreciate allusion to or reworking of such poetic forms in tragedy and comedy; and how various types of performance contributed to transmission of written texts of the poems until they were collected and edited by Alexandrian scholars in the third and second centuries BC.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Reflections of choral song in early hexameter poetry
• Alcman's first Partheneion and the song the Sirens sang
• Cyberchorus: Pindar’s Κηληδόνες and the aura of the artificial
• Enunciative fiction and poetic performance. Choral voices in Bacchylides’ epinicians
• Eros and praise in early Greek lyric
• The parrhesia of young female choruses in Ancient Greece
• A second look at the poetics of re-enactment in Ode 13 of Bacchylides
• The Ceians and their choral lyric: Athenian, epichoric and pan-Hellenic perspectives
• Song, politics, and cultural memory: Pindar's Pythian 7 and the Alcmaeonid temple of Apollo
• Epinician choregia: funding a Pindaric chorus
• Pindar and the Aeginetan patrai: Pindar’s intersecting audiences
• Olympians 1–3: A song cycle?
• The dissemination of Pindar’s non-epinician choral lyric
• Choral self-awareness: on the introductory anapaests of Aeschylus’ Supplices
• Epinician and tragic Worlds: the case of Sophocles’ Trachiniae
• Alcman at the end of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata: ritual interchorality
• Alcman: from Laconia to Alexandria
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index of proper names and subjects
• Index locorum