Let us recapitulate, since the steps Socrates is taking are so important for his critique of poetry (it is noteworthy that at several junctures, Socrates generalizes his results from epic to dithyrambic, encomiastic, iambic, and lyric poetry; 533e5 534a7, 534b7 c7).
At any rate, in 497 or 496 Pindar, scarcely more than 20 years of age, won first place in the dithyrambic competition at the Great Dionysia, an event that had been introduced in 508.
From about 450 bc onward, dithyrambic poets such as Timotheus, Melanippides, Cinesias, and Philoxenus employed ever more startling devices of language and music until for ancient literary critics dithyrambic acquired the connotations of "turgid" and "bombastic".
His dithyrambic lyrics, numbering more than 30,000 verses altogether, are not at all abstract or romantic.
In the last decades of the 6th century bc in Athens, during the tyranny of Peisistratus, a dithyrambic competition was officially introduced into the Great Dionysia by the poet Lasus of Hermione.
By their side, and later, flourished the great poets who set words to music for choirs, Alcman, Arion, Stesichorus, Simonides, and Ibycus, who were followed at the close of the 5th century by Bacchylides and Pindar, in whom the tradition of the dithyrambic odes reached its highest development.
He was close to important people there, including the politician and naval strategist Themistocles, and he achieved numerous successes in dithyrambic competitions.
One wrote: In every city of more than 5,000 inhabitants this unobtrusive, smooth character had a friend — bookseller, member of the local literary society, editor of the local paper — who would be waiting on the platform when Zweig arrived, introduce his lecture, and write the dithyrambic feuilleton for the next day's local journal.
As the Communist Party encouraged the writing of proletarian novels, in the early thirties, squalid detail and dithyrambic political earnestness soon became clichés.
Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, had described the scene, with Thoreau executing "dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice," while Hawthorne "moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave," and Emerson "closed the line evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching head foremost, half lying on the air".
Aristotle traced the origin of drama to the moment when the leader of the dithyrambic chorus stood apart from his 50 men and boys and began to sing back to them.
