dithyramb

plural dithyrambs

1. A raucous and ardent choral hymn sung in ancient Athens in honor of the god Dionysus.

   1 more example

   Now of the numerical constitution of the chorus before Aeschylus we know nothing; but to him, in the Suppliant Maidens at least, it was a happy coincidence that the myth gave to Danaüs fifty daughters, a number exactly equal to that of the chorus of the dithyramb, from which tragedy itself had sprung.

   1924, Herbert Weir Smyth, “II. The Suppliant Maidens”, in Aeschylean Tragedy, page 51

2. A poem or oration in the same style.

   While those who drown a truth’s empiric part In dithyramb or dogma turn frenetic; — Than whom no writer could be less poetic He left this lesson for all verse, all art.

   1969, Robert Conquest, “George Orwell”, in Arias from a Love Opera, and Other Poems, Macmillan, page 32

3. An impassioned speech; a rant.

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   During the seven decades that have elapsed since that distracted wife, mother, and blindly impassioned mistress threw herself beneath the wheels of the train - thus terminating, with a gesture symbolic of what already had happened to her soul, her tragedy of disorientation - a tumultuous and unremitting dithyramb of romances, news reports, and unrecorded cries of anguish has been going up to the honor of the bull-demon of the labyrinth: the wrathful, destructive, maddening aspect of the same god who, when benign, is the vivifying principle of the world.

   1968, Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd edition, London: Fontana Press, published 1993, page 25

   Synonyms: admonition, condemnation, diatribe, harangue, impugnation, j'accuse, jeremiad, philippic