Truly, I too, who dwell on a rock am renowned for Hellenic excellence in games on the one hand and on the other I am also known for my abundant contribution to music.
William Race, who translates μοῖσαν as poetry, thinks that the “reference can be to the amount of poetry their [i.e., Cean athletes’) victories have occasioned or to the Cean poets Simonides and Bacchylides (whose first two odes celebrate Cean victors).”47 Whereas the expression is general enough to include the inspiration that Cean athletic victories offered to Simonides and Bacchylides, textual and contextual indications suggest that the reference cannot be so restrictive.
The μὲν-δὲ construction indicates that the chorus boasts of the athletic excellence of Ceans on the one hand and of their contribution to music on the other. What does the chorus’ contribution consist of? It consists of beautiful singing and dancing. Pindar has not supplied an indirect object of the participle παρέχων, but it is not hard to imagine the recipients: first and foremost the chorus sing and dance for Apollo. They also sing and dance for the human audience of the paean, but an important beneficiary of their musical talents is the composer of the paean, Pindar, who could be the chorodidaskalos.48 By making the chorus draw attention to their musical contribution, Pindar paid a compliment to the Cean performers of his paean, along the lines “You sing and dance splendidly! You inspire me.” The clever combination of an adverb denoting abundance (ἅλις) with an iterative present participle (παρέχων) and a direct object denoting the totality of music (μοῖσαν), namely words, melody, and dance, points to the countless occasions that Cean choruses performed in the past, and presumably would perform in the future. As we shall see in the next section, instruction of choruses has a divine paradigm. In teaching and leading choruses, poets enacted in the here and now the instruction gods offered mortal choreuts once upon a time, and shared in the pleasure mortals offered to the gods. Sometimes the pleasure was so intense that poets thought of their choruses as Sirens.
Singing and Dancing with and for the Gods
From Homer onward poets missed no opportunity to foreground their privileged relation with the Muse(s), but they were aware that choruses had also a privileged relation with the gods, since their participation in ritual celebrations was indispensable.49
We may first turn to Plato’s eloquent descriptions in the Laws. In 653e–654b the Athenian states that the gods appointed Apollo, the Muses, and Dionysus as the mortals’ fellow-celebrants and fellow-choreuts:
ΑΤΗΕΝΙΑΝ. Very good. Now these forms of education, which consist in right discipline in pleasures and pains, grow slack and weakened to a great extent in the course of men’s lives; so the gods, in pity for the human race thus born to misery, have ordained the feasts of thanksgiving as periods of respite from their troubles; and they have granted them as companions in their feasts the Muses and Apollo the master of music, and Dionysus, that they may at least set right again their modes of discipline by associating in their feasts (συνεορταστὰς) with gods. […] Now, whereas all other creatures are devoid of any perception of the various kinds of order and disorder in movement (which we term rhythm and harmony), to men the very gods, who were given, as we said, to be our fellows in the dance (τοὺς θεοὺς συγχορευτὰς), have granted the pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony, whereby they cause us to move and lead our choruses (χορηγεῖν ἡμῶν), linking us one with another by means of songs and dances; and to the choruses they have given their name from the “cheer” implanted therein.50
It is worth noting that in the Laws the envisaged context of human and divine interaction is the festival. The designation of Apollo, the Muses, and Dionysus as fellow-choreuts (συγχορευταί), chorus-leaders (χορηγοί), and fellow-celebrants (συνεορτασταί) suggests that they are imagined as being present on these festive occasions, guiding the minds, the voices, the steps, and the actions of mortals. A little later in the Laws the Athenian will describe the performance of the three choruses before the whole city: the chorus of children led by the Muses, the chorus of those under 30 who will invoke and pray to Apollo Paean, and the chorus of those between 30 and 60 (664cd). It is worth noting that the interaction of human choruses with the gods, as envisaged by the Athenian in this instance, is unmediated by poets.51
One would be tempted to attribute the absence of poets to Plato’s hostility toward them, but the truth of the matter is that literary representations, prior to Plato, depict Apollo and Dionysus as leaders of human choruses and fellow-celebrants, and Plato may have had these in mind. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, for instance, concludes with precisely this image. First Apollo gives his Cretan priests a set of cultic instructions (490–501): to make an altar upon the beach, light fire upon it, and make an offering of white meal; next, to stand around the altar, which they must name Delphinius, and pray to the god as Apollo Delphinius; then the Cretan priests should dine beside their ship and pour an offering to the Olympian gods; once they have eaten, they should follow the god singing the hymn Ie Paean, until they reach the place where they shall be responsible for Apollo’s rich temple.
The Cretans followed the god’s instruction and when the time came Apollo arrived to lead the chorus to his sanctuary. Not surprisingly, under the musical guidance of Apollo, the chorus sing a paean (513–523):
Then they took their meal by the swift, black ship, and poured an offering to the blessed gods who dwell on Olympus. And when they had put away craving for drink and food, they started out with the lord Apollo, the son of Zeus, to lead them, holding a lyre in his hands, and playing sweetly as he stepped high and featly. So the Cretans followed him to Pytho, marching in time as they chanted the Ie Paean after the manner of the Cretan paean-singers and of those in whose hearts the heavenly Muse has put sweet-voiced song. With tireless feet they approached the ridge and straightway came to Parnassus and the lovely place where they were to dwell honoured by many men. There Apollo brought them and showed them his most holy sanctuary and rich temple.
(trans. Evelyn-White 1932)
This is the prototypical rite in honor of Apollo in which the god gives his future priests unmediated cultic and choral instructions. In Platonic terms he is a fellow-celebrant and a chorēgos.52
Dionysus and the Muses are also represented as fellow-celebrants and fellow-choreuts in pre-Platonic literary sources. Euripides’ Bacchae is the most extensive, but certainly not the only account of Dionysus’ depiction as a fellow-celebrant and chorēgos of female choruses.53 Similarly the Muses are also imagined as fellow-dancers. In the Second Stasimon of Euripides’ Heracles the chorus cast themselves as eternal choreuts who, despite their old age, still sing and dance and hope never to cease singing of the Muses who have made them dance (αἵ μ’ ἐχόρευσαν, 686). I have argued elsewhere that in this instance the expression χορεύω τινά should be interpreted in the light of the representation of the gods as fellow-choreuts in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and the Laws.54 In other words the expression Μούσας αἵ μ’ ἐχόρευσαν can be translated as “the Muses who taught me to sing and dance.” This interpretation gains further support by the chorus’ immediately following parallelism of their song-dance in the here and now of the dramatic reality with the Deliades’ recurrent song-dance on Delos.55 This parallelism or “choral projection,” as Albert Henrichs labeled the tendency of tragic choruses, further enhances the Chorus’ claim to the divine origin and quality of their virtuosity.
These epic and dramatic representations of choral interaction of mortals and immortals conjure up an illud tempus when the world was taking shape, institutions were being established,
