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"Circular chorus" was *#tlzqm3 another name for the dithyramb at Athens, where it was danced and sung by fifty men or boys around the altar in the orchestra. So it was distinguished from the rectangular dramatic chorus of the later drama. At Athens the contest of dithyrambic choruses was not among individu- als but among tribes. Each chorus was drawn from one of the ten tribes, five offering choruses of men, and five of boys. The expense of producing a festival dithyramb was first undertaken by a wealthy citizen, the choregus. The cost was much greater than for the later performances of tragedy and comedy. In the years of Athens's decline, when no one citizen could afford to pay for this honor, it was shared by several, then finally undertaken by the state. During the Great Age the citizen-sponsors competed for the services of the best poets and air max shoes 95 sale cheap musicians. The victorious tribe was rewarded with a tripod dedicated to Dionysus. The winning poet was awarded a bull, second prize was an amphora of wine, and third prize was a goat. The winning choregus also was rewarded. Simonides boasted of the many times his head had been air max shoes 95 sale cheap covered with air max sandals 95 ribbons and roses, when he was carried home in a festal chariot. The dithyramb, after about 450 B.C., gradually disintegrated. As the words became less important, the music dominated and these latter-day bursts of bombast made "dithyrambic" a synonym for wild and vehement rhetoric. The dithyramb finally became secular music, like the nineteenth- century European oratorio but with the popular appeal of modern calypso. In ancient Greece, where poets sang, music and poetry were never quite separate. When the dithyramb lost its cheap nike air max 95 shoes rhythmic symmetry, strophe (when the chorus moved in one direction) against antistrophe (when the chorus moved in the other direction), solo songs were added. Literary form was smothered by the sounds of music. The new looseness of the dithyramb offended critics. As the flute acquired modulation and a wider range some complained of the undue infiuence of the fiute player. Plato himself was troubled by the audience's passion for novelty, which would prove a catalyst for creativity. "With the ancients," Dionysius of Halicarnassus (died 7 B.C.) reported nostalgically in his Antiquities, "even the dithyramb was orderly." By the fourth century B.C. the traditional forms had dissolved, and the dithyramb lost its featured place in Athenian festivals. But its fertile by- products would glorify Greece long after dithyramb had become a strange archaic word.