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Rh were probably public servants, working for their respective states. That is one Dorian element in the choir-song. Another is that, as soon as it ceases to be genuinely the performance by the community of a public duty, it becomes a professional entertainment for the pleasure of a patron who pays. The non-choral poets, Alcaeus, Sappho, Archilochus, wrote to please themselves; they were 'their own,' as Aristotle puts it, and did not become ᾰ̓́λλου, 'another's.' Anacreon lived at courts and must really have depended on patronage; but his poems are ostensibly written at his own pleasure, not at the bidding of Polycrates. The training of a professional chorus, however, means expense, and expense means a patron who pays. Pindar and Simonides with their trained bands of dancers could only exist in dependence on the rich oligarchies.

The richest Ionian state, Athens, looked askance at this late development. Her dithyrambs and tragedies were not composed to the order of a man, nor executed by hired performers; they were solemnly acted by free citizens in the service of the great Demos. Occasionally a very rich citizen might have a dithyramb performed for him, like a Dorian noble; but even Megacles, who employed Pindar, cuts a modest and economical figure by the side of the Aeginetans and the royalties; and the custom was not common in Athens. Alcibiades employed Euripides for a dithyramb, but that was part of his ostentatious munificence. The Ionian states in general were either too weak or too democratic to exercise much influence on the professional choir-song.

The choir-song formed a special branch of literature with a unity of its own, but it had no one name. Aris-