Answer by Sheila Murnaghan
We know too little about Herodotus’ biography, and especially about his early life in Halicarnassus, to say for sure whether he himself participated in choruses. But we do know that learning the necessary skills of singing and dancing and then exhibiting them in choral performances was an essential part of growing up for elite men and women throughout the classical Greek world. Writing about a century after Herodotus, the philosopher Plato has a character in one of his dialogues define “the uneducated man” as one “without choral training or experience” (Laws 2.654a). The chorus was a central institution of civic and religious life, through which cities showcased their resources, honored their gods and heroes, reinforced social coherence and order, and defined their relations with other cities. Choral performances by young people were widespread, and often had the function of putting the young women and men of a community on display as they came of age and became eligible for marriage or military service.
In Athens, the city for which we have the most evidence, we know, for example, that every year at the Great Dionysia, the major festival in honor of Dionysus, ten choruses of fifty boys (one from each of the tribes into which the population was divided) along with ten choruses of fifty men, would compete in performing dithyrambs, song-dances in which traditional myths were retold. Those boys would have already had regular lessons in lyre-playing, singing, and dancing, and they prepared for their performances by living together for a period of several months, supported by a rich citizen, eating special food, and being trained by musicians, choreographers, and often the poet who had composed the work. This training was designed not only to produce a successful performance but to inculcate the discipline, self-restraint, stamina, and teamwork necessary for citizenship in a well-functioning community. While we don’t know what happened along these lines in Halicarnassus, that city clearly had its own traditions of performed poetry, since a relative of Herodotus, Panyassis, was a celebrated epic poet.
Whatever his personal history, when Herodotus began to spend time in Athens, he associated there with men who themselves had extensive choral experience, and he was able to attend performances of the spectacular specialized form of choral poetry that had developed there: tragedy, in which choruses interacted with actors who were impersonating characters in myth and acting out their stories. Tragedy was a high profile, influential artform, and its impact on Herodotus can be seen in the way he draws on the themes and story-telling techniques of tragedy in his portrayal of prominent individuals in the Histories. One small bit of evidence suggests that he was a personal friend of Sophocles, the tragedian whose works seem to be most closely echoed by Herodotus and who himself alludes to several passages from the Histories in his plays. The first and second century CE writer Plutarch claims that Sophocles wrote a poem that began “Sophocles wrote a song for Herodotus/ when he was fifty-five . . .” (Plutarch, Moralia 785c). This song would most likely have been sung at a symposium, a party for elite men at which participants also reperformed parts of choral songs they had been trained to present.
The cultural importance of the chorus is reflected in various references that pop up throughout the Histories. One of the first stories Herodotus tells is about the celebrity poet Arion, the legendary inventor of the dithyramb and the first to train choruses to perform it, who was miraculously rescued by dolphins when he was captured by pirates and thrown overboard (1.23-24). The political significance of choruses is indicated by a story about Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon. When he got into a war against Argos, Cleisthenes arranged for tragedy-like choral laments that were being performed for the Argive hero Adrastus (who had a shrine in Sicyon) to be put on in honor of Dionysus instead (5.67).
Some of the choral performances of Herodotus’ own day come into the Histories because they were thought to commemorate historical events. So Herodotus describes how on the island of Aegina choruses of women sang abusive songs before two statues of gods that the Aeginetans had once stolen from their enemies (5.83). And he tells how an ongoing choral performance on the island of Samos originated in a remarkable episode. Some Corinthians had landed on the island with 300 boys from Corcyra who were on their way to being castrated as a form of political revenge on their families. The Samians tried to protect the boys, but their Corinthian minders kept them under control and cut off their provisions. So the Samians instituted a festival, in which boys and girls danced by with baskets full of sesame and honey snacks, which the Corcyrean boys snatched up (3.48).
Finally, one memorable anecdote, also involving Cleisthenes of Sicyon, illustrates in reverse the definitive role of appropriately disciplined singing and dancing in a young man’s social standing and prospects for success. One of the events in a competition to decide who would marry Cleisthenes’ daughter was after-dinner singing. The leading contender, Hippoclides, from a prominent Athenian family, got drunk, started to dance, jumped up on a table, and performed wild movements, finally exposing himself by standing on his head and waving his legs in the air. That was the end of his chances. As Cleisthenes put it, “you have danced away your marriage,” which led to a famous response: “Hippoclides doesn’t care” (6.129).
Further Reading:
Luis Calero, 2018. “Training a Chorus in Ancient Greece,” Gilgameš 2: 15-27.
Helen H. Bacon, 1994. “The Chorus in Greek Life and Drama,“ Arion 3: 6-24.
Deborah T. Steiner, 2021. Choral Constructions in Greek Culture: The Idea of the Chorus in the Poetry, Art and Social Practices of the Archaic and Early Classical Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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