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in this holy time, the songful prophet of the Pierians.

      (trans. Race modified)

      A dithyramb that Pindar composed for the Athenians begins with an invitation to the Olympians and come and join the chorus who are dancing for Dionysus (Dithyramb 4, fr. 75.1–19):

      Come to the chorus, Olympians, and send over it glorious grace, you gods who are coming to the city’s crowded, incense-rich navel in holy Athens and to the glorious, richly adorned agora. Receive wreaths of plaited violets and the songs plucked in springtime, and look upon me with favor as I proceed from Zeus with splendor of songs secondly to that ivy-knowing god, whom we mortals call Bromios and Eriboas as we sing of the offspring of the highest of fathers and of Cadmeian women. Like a seer, I do not fail to notice the clear signs, when, as the chamber of the purple-robed Horai is opened, the nectar-bearing flowers bring in the sweet-smelling spring. Then, then, upon the immortal earth are cast the lovely tresses of violets, and roses are fitted to hair and voices of songs echo to the accompaniment of pipes and choruses come to Semele of the circling headband.

      (trans. Race)

      Epilogue

      The preceding discussion focused on the great masters of the archaic and early classical period and their choral compositions for female and male choruses at the apogee of the song-dance culture. Choral activity does not of course die with Pindar. As Ewen Bowie has argued, choral activity remains a marker of Greek identity well into the Roman period.60 What survives however suggests that by the end of the fifth century Pindar’s compositions were already “silent” (according to Eupolis because of people’s indifference to beauty).61 The fractures through our scant and fragmentary evidence suggest that women had a more important role both as choreuts and chorodidaskaloi in the artistic and cultic life of the Greek cities than our surviving evidence allows us to establish. There must have been countless gifted women who, like Andaisistrota, trained young girls but only one, Sappho, made it to the canon of the nine lyric poets and was considered the tenth Muse. The various angles on the theme of the aging poet/chorodidaskalos must have reflected the anxiety professional poets felt at the prospect of reaching an age when they could no longer teach and lead choruses. It was not simply an anxiety at quitting a profession. We have seen that comparisons of the performance of female choruses with the irresistible appeal of the Sirens revealed the inspiration and the pleasure that the chorodidaskaloi derived from their interaction with choruses, and that inspiration and pleasure is something they would miss. In the archaic and early classical period choral instruction had a divine model, on the pedagogical significance of which Plato capitalized later. The Muses, Apollo, and Dionysus were believed to be the mortals’ fellow-choreuts and fellow-celebrants. This privileged relationship of human choruses with the gods had important implications for their cultic authority and musical virtuosity, for like the poets, choruses could also claim that their art had divine origin.

      FURTHER READING

      Notes

      1 1 Greek has a variety of terms denoting festivals and festivities: agōn (ἀγών), heortē (ἑορτή), panēgyris (πανήγυρις), thalia (θαλία), aglaia (ἀγλαΐα), kōmos (κῶμος), etc.

      2 2 See Athanassaki 2018b with references.

      3 3 For the booming song culture in the archaic and classical period see Herington 1985. For traditional cult songs see Kowalzig 2007: 6–7. For the various types of song-dances see Weiss 2020: 162–164.

      4 4 For theōria see Rutherford 2013.

      5 5 Homeric Hymn to Apollo 156–164; for the Deliades see Calame 1997: 104–110; Clay 1989; Kowalzig 2007: 56–80; Peponi 2009; Nagy 2013. For the Hellenistic testimonies concerning the Deliades see Bruneau 1970: 35–38. Rutherford 2000 suggests that the Homeric hymn reflects choral practices which are attested by Hellenistic inscriptions.

      6 6 The term “choreut” (χορευτής <χορός, χορεία in Greek) is preferable to the term dancer or singer, because it denotes simultaneous singing and dancing. Greek has special words for dancer (orchestēs) and singer (aoidos, hymnētēs, etc.). As a rule the chorus sang and danced in unison; Naerebout 2017 reiterates his conviction that choruses always sang and danced in unison. Other scholars opt for more open models. Lardinois 1996, for instance, envisages

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