Olympian and Pythian Odes

6. Ἐγκώμια Encomia/laudatory poems are laudatory poems in the widest sense. In a narrower sense they are songs sung at the Dorian κῶμος revel/procession in honor of distinguished men, and evidently it would often be difficult to tell an ἐπινίκιον victory ode from an ἐγκώμιον. 7. Παοίνια, or “drinking-songs,” of which the σκόλια crooked songs, or rather σκολιά,1 were sung by individuals at banquets. The name is puzzling, and has been variously explained in ancient and in modern times; the “obliquity” of the σκολιόν being referred now to the zigzag way in which the song was passed on from singer to singer, now to the character of the rhythm. Engelbrecht, the most recent investigator, maintains that it was a generic name for the lighter Aeolian (Terpandrian) composition in contradiction to the gravity of the epic. As developed in literature the skolia were brief, pithy songs, almost epigrammatic. The themes were love, wine, the philosophy of life, the stirring scenes of history. Clement of Alexandreia compares them oddly, but not ineffectively, with the psalms. The most famous of all the Greek σκολιά is that of Kallistratos in honor of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the slayers of Hipparchos (I shall carry my sword in a myrtle bough). Böckh thinks that Pindar developed the σκολιόν and put it into a choral form, the chorus dancing while the singer was singing. All which is much disputed.2 The fragments that we have are dactylo-epitrite. One of them is referred to in the introduction to O. 13.

8. The dithyramb (διθύραμβος) — a half-dozen etymologies might be given, each absurder than the other — is a hymn to Iakchos (Bakchos), the mystic god, whose more mundane side is expressed by the name Dionysos. It is a fragment of one of Pindar’s dithyrambs that preserves to us the memorable encomium of Athens:

O gleaming and violet-crowned and sung in story,
Bulwark of Hellas, famous Athens, divine city.