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Chorus and Festival

This chapter and the next considers the ‘snapshot’ of choral performance (dramatic and non-dramatic) that is presented by Aeschines, Demosthenes, Xenophon, Plato, comic poets, and historians and other fourth-century artists and writers. This allows for the contextualization of the evidence for fourth-century dramatic choruses in the choral culture of the time, but it also allows the examination of the cultural weight and impact of alluding to ‘a chorus’ in the fourth century. Here the chapter focuses on the chorus’ close associations with festival and how those associations are used by individuals for literary and rhetorical effect. Special attention is paid to the ways in which choral imagery can be separated out from imagery celebrating and commemorating choregoi and, in doing so, the chapter displays how important it is to be sensitive to the tendency in the sources to blur the boundaries between chorus and individual.