A special kind of prosodia were the Parthenia, or processional hymns of maidens; such, for example, as the Athenian girls sang to Pallas while they climbed the staircase of the Parthenon. Aristophanes has presented us with a beautiful example of antiphonal Parthenia at the end of his _Lysistrata_, where choruses of Athenian and Spartan girls sing turn and turn about in rivalry. Alcman won his laurels at Sparta by the composition of this kind of hymn. A fragment (Bergk, p. 842) only remains to show what they were like: "No more, ye honey-voiced, sweet-singing maidens, can my limbs support me: oh, oh, that I were a cerylus, who skims the flower of the sea with halcyons, of a dauntless heart, the sea-blue bird of spring!" Such Parthenia, when addressed to Phoebus, were called Daphnephorica; for the maidens carried laurel-branches to his shrine. A more charming picture cannot be conceived than that which is presented to our fancy by these white-robed virgins, each with her rod of bay and crown of laurel-leaves, ascending the marble steps of the temple of the Dorian god. John Lyly, who had imbibed the spirit of Greek life, has written a hymn, "Sing to Apollo, god of day!" which might well have been used at such a festival. The prosodia of which we have been speaking were addressed to all the gods. But there were other choric hymns with special names, consecrated to the service of particular deities. Of this sort was the pæan, sung to Phoebus in his double character of a victorious and a healing god. The pæan was both a song of war and of peace; it was the proper accompaniment of the battle and the feast. In like manner the hyporchem, which, as its name implies, was always accompanied by a dance, originally formed a portion of the cult of Phoebus. The chorus described in the _Iliad_, xviii. 590, and the glorious pageant of Olympus celebrated in the _Hymn to Apollo_, 186, were, technically speaking, hyporchems. As the pæan and the hyporchem were originally consecrated to Apollo, so the dithyramb and the phallic hymn belonged to Dionysus. The dithyramb never lost the tempestuous and enthusiastic character of Bacchic revelry; but in time it grew from being a wild celebration of the mystic sufferings of Bacchus into the sublime art of tragedy. Arion forms the point of this transition. He seems to have thrown a greater reality of passion and dramatic action into his choruses, which led to the introduction of dialogue, and so by degrees to tragedy proper. Meanwhile the dithyramb, as a tumultuous choric song, retained its individual existence. As Arion had devoted his genius to the cultivation of the tragic or cyclic chorus, Lasos, the master of Pindar, stamped his own style upon the dithyrambic ode as it continued to be used at festive meetings. Every town in Greece had its chorodidascalus, a functionary whom Aristophanes ridicules in the person of Kinesias in the _Birds_.[81] He is introduced warbling