(from Gk. purrichios, purrichē).
One of several ancient Greek rhythmic patterns, by extension also applied to a war dance. In metric theory (e.g. Hephaestion, Handbook, 3; Aristides Quintilianus, On Music, i.22; etc.), the pyrrhic foot consists of two short syllables () and is employed in such meters as iambic and ionic (Aristides Quintilianus, On Music, i.25, 27). The pyrrhic dance is commonly associated with the hyporcheme (huporchēma), but the distinction may depend on whether the dance is accompanied by song. Proclus (Useful Knowledge) regarded the pyrrhic and the hyporcheme as synonymous, while Athenaeus (Sophists at Dinner, xiv, 630d) distinguished among three types of dance: pyrrhic, hyporchematic and gymnopaidic. Athenaeus observed that a principal feature of the pyrrhic dance is speed, which certainly accords with the rhythmic pattern of the pyrrhic foot. On the authority of Aristoxenus, he stated that the pyrrhic (named for the Spartan Pyrrhicus) is a dance practised from the age of five by boys under arms as a preparation for war; other Greeks associated the dance with Dionysus, replacing spears with the thursos. Plato (Laws, vii, 815a–b) described the dance as representing the types of defensive and offensive movements used in battle (cf Lucian, On Dance, 10, 16).
F.A. Wright: ‘The Technical Vocabulary of Dance and Song’, Classical Review, xxx (1916), 9–10
R.J. Moffatt: The Dance in the Life of the Early Greeks (diss., George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, TN, 1932)
T.G. Georgiades: Der griechische Rhythmus: Musik, Reigen, Vers und Sprache (Hamburg, 1949; Eng. trans., 1956/R, as Greek Music, Verse and Dance)
L. Lawler: Dance in Ancient Greece (Middletown, CT, 1964), 106–8
G. Prudhommeau: La danse grecque antique (Paris, 1965)
J.W. Fitton: ‘Greek Dance’, Classical Quarterly, new ser., xxiii (1973), 254–74
A.J. Neubecker: Altgriechische Musik (Darmstadt, 1977), 91–2
THOMAS J. MATHIESEN