67 Sentences With "dithyramb" | Random Sentence Generator

She had kept silent about it, and as she sang "Dithyramb," the 10-year statute of limitations was about to expire.

In its response filed on Thursday, a lawyer for Concord described Mueller's position as a "hysterical dithyramb about the future of American elections."

Tragedy was born, old-school anthropologists will tell you, when a dithyramb singer stepped out of the chorus and decided to act out the story instead.

Therapeutic both mentally and physically: Soon after that 2013 performance of "Dithyramb," Ms. Dhegrae, the founder of the Resonant Bodies Festival of contemporary vocal music, found she could no longer sing.

Waldman also refers to the "dithyramb," what the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics characterizes as an "ecstatic, vehement or unpredictable" poem, which the ancient Greeks traditionally performed in honor of Dionysus.

In June, they argued the government's requests to restrict the defense's ability to use and share certain evidence was rooted in "a hysterical dithyramb about the future of American elections" and cited earlier cases that didn't actually relate to the issue at hand.

Politics of sonorities All the organs collapse I am a dithyramb again Lie down with the cobra Tell me ye olde cobra migration narratives ("entanglement") But it is these qualities that are especially hard to preserve in the face of what seems an unrelenting capitalist drive for money, productivity, race-based economic inequality and soulless extraction of resources sugar-coated with fundamentalist religion.

Arion on a sea horse, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1855) Arion riding a Dolphin, by Albrecht Dürer circa. 1514 Arion (; ) was a kitharode in ancient Greece, a Dionysiac poet credited with inventing the dithyramb: "As a literary composition for chorus dithyramb was the creation of Arion of Corinth,"Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur Wallace. 1927. Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy. Second edition revised by T.B.L. Webster, 1962.

Dichtkunst, vol. ii. pt. 2, p. 333Ulrici, vol. ii. p. 613Schmidt, Diatribe in Dithyramb, pp.

Richard Edward Wilson's 1983 Dithyramb is for oboe and clarinet. Wolfgang Rihm composed a 30-minute work, Concerto, in 2000, with the subtitle Dithyrambe and a scoring for string quartet and orchestra. In 1961 the American choreographer James Waring created a dance piece entitled Dithyramb with music and objects by the Fluxus artist George Brecht.

Herodotus (1.23) says "Arion was second to none of the lyre-players in his time and was also the first man we know of to compose and name the dithyramb and teach it in Corinth". However J.H. Sleeman observes of the dithyramb, or circular chorus, "It is first mentioned by Archilochus (c 665 BC) … Arion flourished at least 50 years later … probably gave it a more artistic form, adding a chorus of 50 people, personating satyrs… who danced around an altar of Dionysus. He was doubtless the first to introduce the dithyramb into Corinth".

Sappho and Alcaeus, for instance, were from Lesbos, while Pindar came from Thebes, and Alcman from Sparta. The beginnings of Greek tragedy also have their roots in the archaic period, though the exact history is obscure. The competition in tragedy at the Great Dionysia began in the 530s BC. Aristotle believed that early tragedy developed from the dithyramb, a choral hymn to Dionysius; by ancient tradition the development from dithyramb to tragedy was ascribed to Thespis.

475, f a dithyramb titled "The Centaurs" (),Ath. xv. p. 699Eustathius, On Odysseus p. 1571, 16 licentious verses of the kind called ,Suda s.v. , as corrected by Augustus Meineke, Anal. Alex. p.

J.H. Sleeman, ed. Herodotus Book I. Armand D'Angour notes that Arion's contribution to the reform of the dithyramb, which was eventually performed in a circle and called kuklios choros, was recognised by ancient sources by the fact that they named his father 'Kukleus' ('Circle- man').'How the Dithyramb got its shape'. Classical Quarterly 46.2 (1997) 331-351. Arion is also associated with the origins of tragedy: of Solon John the Deacon reports: “Arion of Methymna first introduced the drama [i.e.

Dionysus surrounded by satyrs Aristotle writes in the Poetics that, in the beginning, tragedy was an improvisation "by those who led off the dithyramb", which was a hymn in honor of Dionysus. This was brief and burlesque in tone because it contained elements of the satyr play. Gradually, the language became more serious and the meter changed from trochaic tetrameter to the more prosaic iambic trimeter. In Herodotus Histories and later sources, the lyric poet Arion of Methymna is said to be the inventor of the dithyramb.

Harwood's organ style was distinctive and technically challenging. He made significant contributions to the repertory of English Romantic music with works requiring considerable virtuoso technique such as Sonata no.1 in C sharp minor op.5, Dithyramb op.

Roger Copeland is Professor of Theater and Dance at Oberlin College where he teaches History of Western Theatre among other classes.Oberlin College and Conservatory: Roger Copeland He enjoys lecturing on the Choric Dithyramb, and representation not re-presenatation.

Its full name is Panic: A Dithyramb for alto saxophone, jazz drummer, wind, brass and percussion. The title indicates both the nature of the music and the fact that it is a representation of the Classical Greek god Pan.

In this context it means "of a degree highest of its kind" or "consummate" (cf. Liddell & Scott, A Greek- English Lexicon). More references by ancient authors are discussed in Pickard-Cambridge's Dithyramb, Tragedy, Comedycf. A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, Chapter IV, beginning on p.

John Dryden's Alexander's Feast (1697) is a notable example of an English language dithyramb. Friedrich Schiller wrote a Dithyrambe in 1796. Friedrich Nietzsche composed a set of Dionysos-Dithyramben in 1888/89.See the comprehensive commentary in Andreas Urs Sommer, Kommentar zu Nietzsches Der Antichrist.

Plutarch, On the Ei at Delphi. Plutarch himself was a priest of Dionysos at Delphi. According to Aristotle, the dithyramb was the origin of Athenian tragedy.Aristotle, Poetics (1449a10–15): "Anyway, arising from an improvisatory beginning (both tragedy and comedy—tragedy from the leaders of the dithyramb, and comedy from the leaders of the phallic processions which even now continue as a custom in many of our cities), [tragedy] grew little by little, as [the poets] developed whatever [new part] of it had appeared; and, passing through many changes, tragedy came to a halt, since it had attained its own nature"; see Janko (1987, 6).

32; Campbell, pp. 1-2\. For a detailed discussion of these "New Music" poets see Campbell, pp. 1-8; see also LeVen 2014. Philoxenus introduced other innovations, for example while the traditional dithyramb was a choral song accompanied by panpipes, Philoxenus' Cyclops sang a solo accompanied by the cithara.

With this parody Aristophanes, while poking fun at literary aspects of Philoxenus' dithyramb, is at the same time commenting on musical developments occurring in the fourth century BC, developing themes that run through the whole play.Jackson, p. 125. It also contains lines and phrases taken directly from Cyclops.

This was the beginning of his Hypogeum, a complex body of work that Lambert-wild constructs over the course of his lifetime. The Hypogeum is composed of three Confessions, three Threnodies, three Epics, two Exclusions, one Dithyramb and 326 “Calentures”. Over the years, Lambert-wild has created a fantasised autobiography that nurtures his work for the stage.

The héroïde is a style long abandoned. Modern writers, freeing themselves from the constraints enforced on poetry by earlier poetics, also abandoned old didactic modes, such as the elegy, the ode, the dithyramb the stanza and the héroïde, letting them fuse in either the meditation or the complaint, only forms under which the poet seems to want to express his thoughts.

Lasus of Hermione () was a Greek lyric poet of the 6th century BC from the city of Hermione in the Argolid. He is known to have been active at Athens under the reign of the Peisistratids. Pseudo-Plutarch's De Musica credits him with innovations in the dithyramb hymn. According to Herodotus, Lasus also exposed Onomacritus's forgeries of the oracles of Musaeus.

These vary in style: three are skolia (drinking songs) one is a hymn to Adonis, and one is a dithyramb. One of the skolia is in a metre named the Praxilleion after her. The three works we know only in paraphrase are all versions of myths.Snyder, Jane McIntosh The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome. Southern Illinois University Press, 1989 p.

As a poet, Redi is best known for the dithyramb Bacco in Toscana ("Bacchus in Tuscany"), which first appeared in 1685. His bacchanalian poem in praise of Tuscan wines is still read in Italy today. He was admitted to two literary societies: the Academy of Arcadia and the Accademia della Crusca. He was an active member of Crusca and supported the preparation of the Tuscan dictionary.

One of the elements that satyr plays contained was the consideration of "wild women". These were women that would dance with the satyrs and be called maenads. The movement of these characters within the plays was part of what began to create the basis from development of comedy. Additionally, these dances had variations that generally were parallel to the different forms of the dithyramb.

The earliest recorded systems of genre in Western history can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. Gérard Genette explains his interpretation of the history of genre in "The Architext". He described Plato as the creator of three imitational, mimetic genres distinguished by mode of imitation rather than content. These three imitational genres include dramatic dialogue, the drama; pure narrative, the dithyramb; and a mixture of the two, the epic.

All of this biographical information could be treated as suspect. More references to alternative origins and discussion of their likelihood can be found in Pickard-Cambridge's Tragedy, Comedy, Dithyramb, and more recently in Rodriguez Noriega Guillen's Epicarmo di Siracusa: Testimonios y Fragmentos.Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2005.10.24 The standard edition of his fragments by Kaibel has now been updated with the publication of Kassel and Austin's Poetae Comici Graeci.

The circular structure, raised on a high squared podium, is the first Greek monument built in the Corinthian order on its exterior. It was originally crowned with an elaborate floral support for the bronze tripod, the prize awarded to Lysicrates' chorus. Its frieze sculpture is thought to depict the myth of Dionysus and the Tyrrhenian pirates from the Homeric Hymn.Barbara Kowalzig, Peter Wilson (eds),Dithyramb in Context,2013, p.46.

The choragic monument of Lysicrates, from The Antiquities of Athens, 1762, Vol. 1, Chap. IV, pl. III. The Choragic Monument The Choragic Monument of Lysicrates near the Acropolis of Athens was erected by the choregos Lysicrates, a wealthy patron of musical performances in the Theater of Dionysus, to commemorate the prize in the dithyramb contest of the City Dionysia in 335/334 BCE, of which performance he was liturgist.

In a "Dionysian Dithyramb," Nietzsche used poetic imagery from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is an example of his new taste for cheerful art after having known the seriousness and horror of life. Following many years of solitude, Zarathustra now wants to share the riches of his wisdom. In order to be loved and appreciated, he will leave his lonely cave in order to generously and completely give of himself.

In archaic times, Arion developed the type of poem called dithyramb, the progenitor of tragedy, and Terpander invented the seven note musical scale for the lyre. Two of the nine lyric poets in the Ancient Greek canon, Alcaeus and Sappho, were from Lesbos. Phanias wrote history. The seminal artistic creativity of those times brings to mind the myth of Orpheus to whom Apollo gave a lyre and the Muses taught to play and sing.

The Dithyramb of the Rose is the first tragedy by Angelos SikelianosMerriam- Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, 1995, p. 1031. written and published in 1932. The first performance was held in Athens, in 1933. This play, is fermented through the beliefs of Sikelianos for Delphi, the Delphic Idea, and the two, already completed, Delphic Festivals (containing in their programme the staging of tragedies: "Prometheus Bound" during the first Delphic Festival and the "Suppliants" in the second).

For these reasons, among many others, oral storytelling flourished in Greece. Greek tragedy as we know it was created in Athens around the time of 532 BC, when Thespis was the earliest recorded actor. Being a winner of the first theatrical contest held in Athens, he was the exarchon, or leader,Aristotle, 'Poetics' of the dithyrambs performed in and around Attica, especially at the rural Dionysia. By Thespis' time, the dithyramb had evolved far away from its cult roots.

However, he was arrested again in 1949 and sentenced to ten years in prison camps. Aiming to secure his release, Akhmatova published a dithyramb to Joseph Stalin, which did not help to release Lev, although it possibly prevented her own imprisonment. The Soviet secret police had already prepared an order for her arrest, but Stalin decided not to sign it. Relations between Lev and his mother became strained, as he blamed her for not helping him enough.

Reliefs show her alongside young female and male attendants with torches, and vessels for purification. Literary sources describe joyous abandonment to the loud, percussive music of tympanon, castanets, clashing cymbals and flutes, and to the frenzied "Phrygian dancing", perhaps a form of circle-dancing by women, to the roar of "wise and healing music of the gods".Roller, 1999, pp. 149 – 151 and footnotes 20 – 25, citing Homeric Hymn 14, Pindar, Dithyramb II.10 (Snell), Euripides, Helen, 1347; Palamedes (Strabo 10.3.

Hordern, p. 447; Scholiast on Theocritus 6 = FGrHist 76 F 58 = Philoxenus fr. 817 Campbell = PMG 817 . However in what is probably the earliest account, that of Phaenias', by way of Athenaes, Philoxenus' Cyclops was written, while the poet was imprisoned in the quarries, as a court satire, where, in the manner of a Roman à clef, the characters in Philoxenus' dithyramb: Polyphemus, Odysseus and the sea nymph Galatea, were meant to represent Dionysius, Philoxenus, and Dionysius' mistress, the aulos-player Galatea, respectively.

The symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, percussion (4 players), harp, celesta, piano and strings. It is in three movements: #Anrufung Apolls (Invocation of Apollo) #Dithyrambe (Dithyramb) #Beschwörungstanz (Incantation Dance) A typical performance lasts approximately 25 minutes. The first movement is broadly divided into three sections. The first is quiet, featuring the flutes, bass clarinet, bassoons and horns, developing into fanfares from the brass.

335 BCE) is the earliest- surviving example and its arguments have influenced theories of theatre ever since. In it, he offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama—comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play—as well as lyric poetry, epic poetry, and the dithyramb). He examines its "first principles" and identifies its genres and basic elements; his analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion.Aristotle Poetics 1447a13 (1987, 1).

The text of Aristophanes' last extant play Plutus (Wealth) has survived with almost all of its choral odes missing. What remains shows Aristophanes (as he does to some extent in all his plays) parodying a contemporary literary work — in this case Philoxenus’ Cyclops. While making fun of literary aspects of Philoxenus' dithyramb, Aristophanes is at the same time commenting on musical developments occurring in the fourth century BC, developing themes that run through the whole play. It also contains lines and phrases taken directly from the Cyclops.

According to Aristotle, tragedy evolved from the satyr dithyramb, an Ancient Greek hymn, which was sung along with dancing in honor of Dionysus. The term , derived from "goat" and "song", means "song of the goats," referring to the chorus of satyrs. Others suggest that the term came into being when the legendary Thespis (the root for the English word thespian) competed in the first tragic competition for the prize of a goat (hence tragedy). Mask of Dionysus found at Myrina (Aeolis) of ancient Greece c.

Philoxenus had his Polyphemus play the cithara, a professional lyre requiring great skill. The Cyclops playing such a sophisticated and fashionable instrument would have been quite a surprising juxtaposition for Philoxenus' audience, and perhaps signaled a competition between two genres of performance — the nome (a primitive music form of a poem set to music) and the dithyramb. So the character of the Cyclops, in this interpretation, would not represent Dionysius the tyrant of Sicily, but perhaps instead the cithara-playing poet Timotheus.Jackson, p. 126.

Pausanias, Description of Greece 10. 10. 8 Another parallel is the myth of Dionysus and the sailors, related in the Homeric Hymns: Tyrrhenian pirates try to lash the god to the mast, but the wood itself starts to sprout and the mast is entwined with ivy (like the god's thyrsus); the sailors leap into the sea and are transformed into dolphins. This is especially interesting because Arion is credited with the invention of the dithyramb, a dionysiac song. A musician riding a dolphin, on a Red-figure stamnos, 360–340 BC. From Etruria.

Angelos Sikelianos (; 28 March 1884 – 19 June 1951)Encyclopædia Britannica - Angelos Sikelianós was a Greek lyric poet and playwright. His themes include Greek history, religious symbolism as well as universal harmony in poems such as The Moonstruck, Prologue to Life, Mother of God, and Delphic Utterance. His plays include Sibylla, Daedalus in Crete, Christ in Rome, The Death of Digenis, The Dithyramb of the Rose and Asklepius. Although occasionally his grandiloquence blunts the poetic effect of his work, some of Sikelianos finer lyrics are among the best in Western literature.

The Sons of Antenor, or Helen Demanded Back, is the first of Bacchylides’s dithyrambs in the text restored in 1896. The opening is incomplete, as part of the papyrus was damaged.“Bacchylides.” The 1911 Classic Encyclopedia. 6 Oct 2006, accessed 12 March 2012. The dithyramb treats a moment in myth before the Trojan war, when Menelaus, Antenor, and Antenor’s sons go to King Priam to demand the return of Helen. As is often the case with ancient Greek literature, Bacchylides plays of the audience’s knowledge of Homer without repeating a scene told by Homer.

Tragedy and comedy, he goes on to explain, are wholly imitative types; the dithyramb is wholly narrative; and their combination is found in epic poetry. When reporting or narrating, "the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that he is any one else"; when imitating, the poet produces an "assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture".Plato, Republic, Book III. In dramatic texts, the poet never speaks directly; in narrative texts, the poet speaks as him or herself.

Detail of a 1st-century BC wall painting from a bedroom in the villa of Agrippa Postumus at Boscotrecase showing a landscape with Galatea and Polyphemus with some of his flock. In his poem Cyclops or Galatea, Philoxenus took up the story of Polyphemus, the Cyclops famously encountered by Odysseus in the Odyssey. It was written to be performed in a wild and ecstatic song-and-dance form — the dithyramb, of which only fragments remain. Philoxenus' story occurs well before the one-eyed monster was blinded by Odysseus.

Farmer, p. 216. The chorus, however, doesn’t want to play sheep and goats, they'd rather be Odysseus and his men, and threaten to blind Cario (as the drunken Cyclops) with a wooden stake:Jackson, p. 125. Philoxenus continues to be quoted in this scene from Aristophanes, and the chorus responds to Cario’s obscene joke with their own comic description of a drunken Cyclops passing out while leading his sheep.Farmer, p. 216. Aristophanes delivers a satiric rebuttal to a dithyramb that has wandered into territory more properly the domain of drama.Farmer, p. 219.

He minted coins with Athena's symbol (the owl), although this was only one type on the so-called Wappenmünzen (heraldic coins) and not a regular device as on the later, standard silver currency. Under his rule were introduced two new forms of poetry, the dithyramb and tragic drama, and the era also saw growth in theatre, arts, and sculpture. He commissioned the permanent copying and archiving of Homer's two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the canon of Homeric works is said to derive from this particular archiving. Much of Athens grandeur started with Peisistratos and his push for larger and more luxurious buildings.

So Cario begins a different kind of performance, parodying Philoxenus' dithyramb.For the intrpretation of this scene followed here, see Farmer, pp. 213-216, and Jackson, pp. 124-126. As a solo performer leading a chorus that sings and dances, Cario recreates the form of a dithyramb being performed. He first casts himself in the role of Polyphemus, and the chorus as his flock of sheep and goats: Cario vocally imitates the sound of a lyre ("threttanello") which is thought to be a reference to Philoxenus having Polyphemus play the lyre, and "to eat the goat’s breakfast" is an obscene joke referencing self- administered fellatio.

Roller, 1999, p. 157. Their cults, however shared several characteristics: the foreigner-deity arrived in a chariot, drawn by exotic big cats (Dionysus by tigers, Cybele by lions), accompanied by wild music and an ecstatic entourage of exotic foreigners and people from the lower classes. By the end of the 1st century BC, their rites In Athens, and elsewhere, were sometimes combined; Strabo notes that Rhea-Cybele's popular rites in Athens might be held in conjunction with Dionysus' procession.Strabo, Geography, book X, 3:18; but see also<\--why? this is much earlier--> Euripides, Bacchae, 64 – 186, and Pindar, Dithyramb II.6 – 9. Like Dionysus, Cybele was regarded as having a distinctly un-Hellenic temperament,Roller, 1994, p. 253.

Polyphemus receives a love-letter from Galatea, a 1st-century AD fresco from Pompeii Depictions of the Cyclops Polyphemus have differed radically, depending on the literary genres in which he has appeared, and have given him an individual existence independent of the Homeric herdsman encountered by Odysseus. In the epic he was a man-eating monster dwelling in an unspecified land. Some centuries later, a dithyramb by Philoxenus of Cythera, followed by several episodes by the Greek pastoral poets, created of him a comedic and generally unsuccessful lover of the water nymph Galatea. In the course of these he woos his love to the accompaniment of either a cithara or the pan-pipes.

Writing more than three centuries after the Odyssey is thought to have been composed, Philoxenus of Cythera took up the myth of Polyphemus in his poem Cyclops or Galatea. The poem was written to be performed as a dithyramb, of which only fragments have survived, and was perhaps the first to provide a female love interest for the Cyclops. The object of Polyphemus’ romantic desire is a sea nymph named Galatea. In the poem, Polyphemus is not a cave dwelling, monstrous brute, as in the Odyssey, but instead he is rather like Odysseus himself in his vision of the world: He has weaknesses, he is adept at literary criticism, and he understands people.

Marsyas Ill-Treated by the Muses by Jacob Jordaens, Mauritshuis in The Hague Marsyas was an expert player on the double-piped double reed instrument known as the aulos. The dithyrambic poet Melanippides of Melos ( 480-430 BC) embellished the story in his dithyramb Marsyas, claiming that the goddess Athena, who was already said to have invented the aulos, once looked in the mirror while she was playing it and saw how blowing into it puffed up her cheeks and made her look silly, so she threw the aulos away and cursed it so that whoever picked it up would meet an awful death. Marsyas picked up the aulos and was later killed by Apollo for his hubris. The fifth-century BC poet Telestes doubted that virginal Athena could have been motivated by such vanity.

Many of his early works took the form of symphonic poems, including Dityramb (Dithyramb) (1909), Ett midsommarstycke (A midsummer piece) and En höstsång (An autumn song). Following the success of these poems, Rangström began work on his symphonies, of which there are four. The first, produced in 1914, is dedicated to the memory of Strindberg – August Strindberg in memoriam; the second, from 1919, is entitled Mitt land (My country); the third from 1929, Sång under stjärnorna (Song under the stars), and the fourth from 1936, Invocatio, for orchestra and organ. He composed three operas, entitled Kronbruden (The Crown Bride), based on a play by Strindberg, which was first performed in 1915, Medeltida (Medieval), published in 1921, and Gilgamesj, based on the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, written during the last years of his life.

There, with the assistance of Rex Nan Kivell, he mounted an exhibition of his pictures in 1939, and almost all the 52 pieces sold. The British Council then sent Sainthill and Miller back to Australia, in charge of a major exhibition of theatre and ballet designs, which opened in Sydney in early 1940. He also designed the costume for Nina Verchinina's character in the farewell performance by the Ballet Russe in Melbourne in September 1940, the ballet Dithyramb, to music by Margaret Sutherland.Michele Potter, Nina Verchinina: some Australian connections; Retrieved 3 September 2013 In 1941 he designed the costumes for a Melbourne production by Gregan McMahon of Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38 and the sets for some of Hélène Kirsova's ballets, A Dream – and a Fairy Tale, Faust, Les Matelots and Vieux Paris.Australia.gov.

Lyric poetry was still a vigorous art-form and its genres were already fully developed when Bacchylides started out on his career. From the time of the Peloponnesian War, around the end of his life, the art-form was in decline, as exemplified by the inferior dithyrambs of Philoxenos of Cythera. Meanwhile, tragedy, as developed by Athenian dramatists of the calibre of Aeschylus and Sophocles, had begun to emerge as the leading poetic genre, borrowing the literary dialect, the metres and poetic devices of lyric poetry in general and the dithyramb in particular (Aristotle Poetics IV 1449a). The debt however was mutual and Bacchylides borrowed from tragedy for some of his effects – thus Ode 16, with its myth of Deianeira, seems to assume audience knowledge of Sophocles's play, Women of Trachis, and Ode 18 echoes three plays – Aeschylus's Persians and Suppliants and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex.

" Napoleon Bonaparte admired Muhammad and Islam,Talk Of Napoleon At St. Helena (1903), pp. 279–80 and described him as a model lawmaker and a great man. Thomas Carlyle in his book Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1840) describes Muhammad as "[a] silent great soul; [...] one of those who cannot but be in earnest". Carlyle's interpretation has been widely cited by Muslim scholars as a demonstration that Western scholarship validates Muhammad's status as a great man in history. Ian Almond says that German Romantic writers generally held positive views of Muhammad: "Goethe’s 'extraordinary' poet-prophet, Herder’s nation builder (...) Schlegel’s admiration for Islam as an aesthetic product, enviably authentic, radiantly holistic, played such a central role in his view of Mohammed as an exemplary world-fashioner that he even used it as a scale of judgement for the classical (the dithyramb, we are told, has to radiate pure beauty if it is to resemble 'a Koran of poetry').

One of the main scenes of the play is the visit of Nero at the oracle of Delphi to take the oracle by Sibylla, priestess of the Oracle, and the reactions of the latter. This work, unlike his first one, the Dithyramb of Rose, is a complete tragedy, in terms of genre and structure: with distinct and complete parts both in the dialogue and chorus parts as well as in the plot and characters. The messages of the time for resistance against the oncoming storm and the pursuit of freedom and human dignity through struggle that the work depicts are portrayed through a dense dramaturgical and finely processed storyline of symbolic relations, influences and elements of ancient drama. A vast number of structures and textual (vocative or expressive) sequences can be found in "Sibylla" all of which can be attributed to ancient tragedy (for instance the way that the landscape of Delphi is depicted is similar to certain tragedies on the same topic).

The tragedy is inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and this is stated by the announcement to his faithful followers and comrades that he will perform a sacrifice to the God at the top of mount Paggaio with the risk of execution and dismemberment by the sacred Maenads of Dionysus. The personae speaking are Orpheus, the First Leader of the Chorus A and the Second Leader of the Chorus B (the latter two as representatives of the large chorus of faithful-comrades following Orpheus). This tragedy has the structure of the early types of this genre, showing higher correlations with the dithyramb (exchange of responses – partly improvised – between the leader of the chorus or the leaders of the chorus and other persons outside the chorus) that evolves into a tragedy, more than a tragedy (with distinct principles and structure) itself. Sikelianos, influenced by the Orphic theology and its founder and leader, Orpheus, places him as Hierophant – officiant in the myth, with clear references to Dionysus.

Although ivy and grapevines are the regular vegetative attributes of Dionysus, at Athens roses and violets could be adornments for Dionysian feasts. In a fragment from a dithyramb praising Dionysus, the poet Pindar (5th century BC) sets a floral scene generated by the opening up of the Seasons (Horae), a time when Semele, the mortal mother of Dionysus, is to be honored: Ariadne (1898) by the pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse: the sleeping red-gowned Ariadne is surrounded by roses, with the sailing background implying both the departure of Theseus and the advent of Dionysus, foreshadowed by his leopardsKarl Kilinski II, Greek Myth and Western Art: The Presence of the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 106. > ... 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 fitted to hair > and voices of songs echo to the accompaniment of pipes > and choruses come to Semele of the circling headband.

Anakreon's verse indicates the magadis was a plucked string instrument:ψάλλω δ´ εῐχοσι / γοοδαῑσι μάγαδιν εχων / Ω Αεύχασπι, σύ ο ήβᾶιςHolding the magadis I pluck its twenty strings; But you, Leukaspis, are in the bloom of youth According to Aristoxenos (as quoted by Athenaeus), the "twenty strings" mentioned by Anakreon would have been plucked without a plectrum. The skill of a magadis player is described in a dithyramb by Telestes:>ᾰλλος δ' ᾰλλαν χλαγγὰν ίεὶς / χεοατόφωνον ὲοέυιζε μάγαδιν / [ὲν] πενταοοάβδω χοοδᾱν ὰονμῶ / χέοα χαμψιδίανλον ὰναστοωψῶν τάχοςEach man hurling forth a different sound from the others Roused up the horn-voiced magadis Turning his hand quickly back and forth across Five-staved joinings of the strings Like a runner at the turning post Scholars have speculated whether "horn-voiced" (keratophonon) could be a reference to plucking of strings with a plectrum, or perhaps a reference to the tone of the instrument, or a structural element of the instrument. Xenophon mentions Thracian soldiers playing ox-hide trumpets (salpinyxin omoboeias) in what he calls the "manner of the magadis".

Charles Segal, Choral lyric in the fifth century, 'The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Greek Literature' (1985), P. Easterling and B. Knox (eds), page 225 Coincidentally he also composed a dithyramb on the subject of Perseus that is now one of the largest fragments of his extant verses.Fr.543, cited by D. Campbell, Greek Lyric III, Loeb Classical Library (1991), page 437–438 Modern scholars generally accept 556-468 BC for his life in spite of some awkward consequences—for example it would make him about fifty years older than his nephew Bacchylides and still very active internationally at about 80 years of age. Other ancient sources also have awkward consequences. For example, according to an entry in the Parian Marble, Simonides died in 468/467 BC at the age of ninety yet, in another entry, it lists a victory by his grandfather in a poetry competition in Athens in 489/488 BC — this grandfather must have been over a hundred years old at that time if the birth dates for Simonides are correct.

The enormity of sin, the charm of virtue, the torture of an evil conscience, the sweetness of a God-fearing life alternate with heaven and hell as the themes of his majestic dithyramb. He returns again and again to the wickedness of woman (one of the fiercest arraignments of the sex), the evils of wine, money, learning, perjury, soothsaying, etc.. This master of an elegant, forceful, and abundant Latinity cannot find words strong enough to convey his prophetic rage at the moral apostasy of his generation. Youthful and simoniacal bishops, oppressive agents of ecclesiastical corporations, the officers of the Curia, papal legates, and the pope himself are treated with no less severity than in Dante or in the sculptures of medieval cathedrals. The early half of the twelfth century saw the appearance of several new factors of secularism unknown to an earlier and more simply religious time: the increase of commerce and industry resultant from the Crusades, the growing independence of medieval cities, the secularization of Benedictine life, the development of pageantry and luxury in a hitherto rude feudal world, the reaction from the terrible conflict of State and Church in the latter half of the 11th century.