Kleisthenes, participation, and the dithyrambic contests of late archaic and classical Athens

This article seeks to test this now predominant interpretation of the dithyrambic competitions as one of the chief means by which tribal solidarity was created and citizens of different regions and social classes got to mingle and connect with each other. In particular it will scrutinize the underlying premise of this new orthodoxy, namely that significant numbers of non-elite Athenian boys and men sang and danced dithyrambs. Admittedly, the dithyrambic contests were only one element of the reforms of Kleisthenes and are only a small part of my own research on participation in the tribes of classical Athens. Nonetheless, the results of this scrutiny will allow us to reconstruct the purposes of the new dithyrambic competitions and to develop a more complex and differentiated understanding of the functions of the different elements of the Kleisthenic reforms.