Fragment 22 Pa Essay

Most probably, fragment 22 CA was not composed during the archaic period. Its meter and especially its language -which has affinities with archaic epic and lyric diction, later Euripidean drama and even Moschion, and is full of rare words- situate it within the broader context of the ‘New Music’. The same is true about its intertextuality with archaic epic, Alcman, Sappho and Ibycus. Its self-referentiality and its sensuality were constructed to captivate the audience’s attention. It was either performed by a circle of bacchantes, or it was created to represent this performative context. It is less likely that it was an excerpt of a dithyramb, at least in the strict sense of the term. It was, most likely, a cultic song or a song created to
It is obvious that in fragment 9 CA a chorus of maidens is gathered somewhere in order to perform a song to honor Demeter. Their gathering was public, as the speaker tries to direct the attention of an audience to the maidens. We get a different image from fragment 22 CA. There the gathering of the maiden-chorus seems to be happening in secrecy: in an immortal meadow full of different flowers next to a deep-shadowed grove where they are going to honor Dionysus (εὐιώτας χορούς) by performing a song. This cultic activity seems to take place in a utopian locus removed from ordinary existence and is described by the use of a group of features used by many archaic poets to describe various places such as the Elysium, the Islands of the Blest, the Hesperides’ Island or Olympus. It can be supposed that this fragment comes from the beginning of a poem where the landscape was amply described before a god was invoked (as in Sappho’s 2 V). In fragment 26 CA the gathering is more public. The maidens should take a position in order for them to be seen. There is no evidence of who they are going to honor. There is almost nothing definite regarding their private character within these texts. This fact generates a new set of questions. Are there any substantial differences between them and other public ‘New Musical’ poetic compositions which can force us to regard them as very private,
They do not contain any puns, far-fetched metaphors or elaborated periphrases encountered mainly in the ‘New Dithyramb’. They are less showy and more subtle. They are not ‘New Dithyrambs’, at least in the strict sense, and it is more than clear that they do not belong to a satyr-play. They are partheneia constructed in order to trigger associations with Alcman and a vast spectrum of archaic and late classical songs. But they are partheneia which belong to the realm of Demeter and Dionysus. They are not pure cultic songs performed in private. There is genre-blending; these fragments have other generic affiliations, as other ‘New Musical’ texts have. As other scholars have already suggested, even cultic songs composed during the time of the ‘New Music’ were adapted to the new religious needs, instead of reproducing the old cultic poetry and they were sometimes influenced by very public genres of the ‘New Music’, such as drama. Nevertheless, fragments 9, 22 and 26 CA seem not to have been composed to fulfill new religious needs. They seem more like a literary imitation of such songs. But did similar peculiar ‘New Musical’ compositions