A song accompanying the movement of the celebrants in a religious procession. Proclus states in Useful Knowledge: ‘It is said to be a prosodion when they process to the altars or temples, and in processing, it was sung to the accompaniment of the aulos. But the hymn, properly speaking, was sung to the accompaniment of the kithara while they stood’. The inscription preceding the second Delphic paean (see Hymn, §I, 3) confirms this association between the prosodion and the hymn or paean, which it may normally have followed. In the paean itself, the prosodion occupies lines 33–40 structured in eight-syllable cola, each of which could easily be subdivided into four groups of two. The emphasis on long syllables gives the prosodion a stately character. The text is devoted to a prayer to Apollo, Artemis and Leto; this accords with Pollux's Onomasticon (i.38), which characterizes a prosodion as a composition particularly devoted to Apollo and Artemis.
Prosodia were among the earliest musical types employed by the Greeks. In three separate locations in his Description of Greece (iv.4.1, iv.33.2 and v.19.10), Pausanias remarks on a prosodion composed by Eumelos sung by a male chorus at the temple of Apollo in Delos during the reign of Phintas (c740–720 bce). Pseudo-Plutarch (On Music, 1132c, 1136f) credited Clonas – the follower of Terpander – as the first to establish auloedic prosodia, adding that prosodia were also composed by Alcman, Pindar, Simonides and Bacchylides. These prosodia were supposed to have been written in the Dorian tonos because of its grandeur and dignity; this may be true, although the surviving prosodion in the second Delphic paean is set in the Lydian tonos. Numerous illustrations of processions are preserved in Greek vase painting that confirm the general descriptions in literature. A red-figure kratēr in Ferrara (Museo nazionale, Inv. T 128) illustrates a prosodion accompanied by an aulete and shows both a statue of one of the gods, which has perhaps been carried in the procession, and the altar itself. The solemnity suggested in this painting suits the prosodion's association with the hymn or the paean.
The prosodion as a type may have encompassed relatively short sections following hymns or paeans – and accompanying limited movement from the place where the hymn was sung to the altar itself – as well as longer independent compositions accompanying more extended processions. The prosodion apparently included some narrative about the god to whom it was addressed, but supplication was the central purpose of its text.
H. Reimann: Studien zur griechischen Musik-Geschichte, B: Die Prosodien und die denselben verwandten Gesänge der Griechen (Glatz, 1885)
R. Muth: ‘Prosodion’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xxiii (Stuttgart, 1957), 856–63
A.J. Neubecker: Altgriechische Musik (Darmstadt, 1977), 50
T.J. Mathiesen: Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE, 1999), 81–3
THOMAS J. MATHIESEN