Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Masks and Acting
On all these occasions, and on other occasions when the young people danced merely for joy and the sheer delight of dancing, the ancient and earlier custom was for one person to start singing and for the rest of the youth to accompany his song with appropriate gesture-dancing and an occasional cry or e'gbfi/wwv, a cry which, at first but a breathless ejaculation, gradually developed from a mere predicate into a fully formed sentence. But the chorus, once started, were not satisfied to limit themselves to a single sentence: they encroached upon the domain of the soloist who started the dithyramb, the e'fa'pxwv, until the portion which they sang of the hymn became as extensive and artistically even more important than his solo. Finally, indeed, the whole hymn or dithyramb might be sung by the chorus, and the e'fdpxwv performed no solo but sank to the position merely of leader of the chorus and the dance.
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