Pindar's Dithyramb 2opens with a reference to the historical development of the genre it exemplifies, the celebrated circular chorus of classical Greece. The first two lines were long known from various citations, notably in Athenaeus, whose sources included the fourth-century authors Heraclides of Pontus and Aristotle's pupil Clearchus of Soli. The third line appears, only partly legible, on a papyrus fragment published in 1919, which preserves some thirty lines of the dithyramb including most of the first antistrophe (thereby guaranteeing the metre for some reconstruction of the first strophe).
The Greeks have long been regarded as innovators across a wide range of fields in literature, culture, philosophy, politics and science. However, little attention has been paid to how they thought and felt about novelty and innovation itself, and to relating this to the forces of traditionalism and conservatism which were also present across all the various societies within ancient Greece. What inspired the Greeks to embark on their unique and enduring innovations? How did they think and feel about the new? This book represents the first serious attempt to address these issues, and deals with the phenomenon across all periods and areas of classical Greek history and thought. Each chapter concentrates on a different area of culture or thought, while the book as a whole argues that much of the impulse towards innovation came from the life of the polis which provided its setting.
In 40312 BC Archinus of the Attic deme Koile proposed a psi?phisnzu or decree calling for the reform of the Old Attic alphabet, as traditionally used almost exclusively on Athenian official documents, to conform with the Ionic usage which was becoming the standard alphabet of the Greek oikoumenC.2 The main elements of the change involved the formal establishment of the character H to denote Ctu instead of consonantal h, and the use of SZ as a long vowel in distinction to 0.j In addition, the Ionian sigmatic compounds E and Y were adopted in place of the traditional spelling which employed the digraphs XZ and CDZ4
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