Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/122

 totle often uses the special name 'dithyramb' to denote the whole genus; this is a popular extension of meaning, influenced by the growth of the later Attic dithyramb in the hands of Timotheus and Philoxenos. Even the names of the different kinds of choir-song are vague. When Alexandrian scholars collected the scattered works of Pindar or Simonides, they needed some principle of arrangement and division. Thus, according to the subjects, we have drink-songs, marriage-songs, dirges, victory-songs, &c.; or, by the composition of the choirs, maiden-songs, boy-songs, man-songs; or, from another point of view again, standing-songs, marching-songs, dancing-songs. Then there come individual names, not in any classification: a 'paean' is a hymn to Apollo; a 'dithyramb,' to Dionysus; an 'ialemos' is perhaps a lament for sickness, and not for death. The confusion is obvious. The collectors in part made divisions of their own; much more they utlised the local names for local varieties of song which were not intended to have any reference to one another. If an 'ialemos' really differed from a 'threnos,' and each from an 'epikedeion,' it was only that they were all local names, and the style of dirge-singing happened to vary in the different localities.

The dithyramb proper was a song and dance to Dionysus, practised in the earliest times in Naxos, Thasos, Boeotia, Attica; the name looks as if it were compounded of Δι-, 'god,' and some form of triumphus, θρίαμβος, 'rejoicing.' It was a wild and joyous song. It first appears with strophic correspondence; afterwards it loses this, and has no more metree than the rhapsodies of Walt Whitman. It was probably accompanied with disguise of some sort; the dancers represented the