Is Korybantic Performance a (Lyric) Genre?

Korybantic rites and other celebrations of similar type, involving loud and exciting music and strong emotional affect, were widely practiced throughout the Greek world, but they are not normally discussed as examples of “Greek lyric,” either by ancient or by modern critics. In this chapter, I want to explore not just the reasons for this omission but also some key characteristics of Korybantic performance1 that serve to illustrate the extent to which the study and interpretation of Greek “song culture,” by focusing—for obvious reasons— so intensively on the verbal aspects of that culture’s high-end achievements (i.e., the surviving poetry of Sappho, Pindar, Anacreon, et al.), has tended to underestimate the abundance and significance of some of the popular song and dance forms that do not survive as written texts. Elite biases, ancient and modern, have thus, I suggest, rather distorted our picture of the archaic and classical music scene overall, and have unduly marginalized certain types of lyric performance that deserve to be includedmore squarely within our critical assessments anddefinitions.Mydiscussionwill also, I hope, contribute another relevant dimension to this volume’s range of approaches to the question of what constitutes a “lyric genre,” and what poetic, social, and performative criteria should be invoked in answering such a question.