(Gk.: ‘artists’, ‘craftsmen’; Lat. artifices).
Professional artists incorporated in guilds (synodoi, later koina), beginning at Athens in the 3rd century bce. They included actors, members of the choruses, solo singers, instrumentalists, dancers, chorēgoi and others concerned with the production and performance of tragedy, comedy, epic and other musical genres at the great public festivals. The term technitai (pl. of technitēs) was used in antiquity as an abbreviation of hoi peri ton Dionuson technitai (literally ‘the artists around Dionysus’; Lat. Dionysiaci artifices: ‘Dionysiac artists’); these technitai were religious associations led by a priest of Dionysus elected every year by the Assembly (Athenaeus, v, 197c–198c). The various guilds sometimes honoured the Muses and the Pythian Apollo, as well as Dionysus. The technitai supplanted the older tradition of the citizen-musician, and their members enjoyed substantial privileges such as exemption from taxation and military duty and unusual freedom to travel. With the expansion of musical activity in the Hellenistic period, their importance increased, and they must have played an important part in the spread of Greek music throughout the Hellenistic world (see Rome, §I, 3(iii)) – for example, 3000 artists are reported to have attended the wedding of Alexander the Great at Ecbatana. At first confined to single cities such as Athens, technitai later enjoyed royal and imperial patronage and played a part in the state cults of various provinces, notably Ptolemaic Egypt and Pergamum. Comparable guilds at Rome included the so-called parasiti Apollinis; for the various types of musicians' guilds at Rome see Fleischhauer, and Wille (1967, pp.357ff).
See also Limenius.
O. Lüders: Die dionysischen Künstler (Berlin, 1873)
A. Müller: ‘Die Vereine der dionysischen Künstler’, Lehrbuch der griechischen Bühnenaherthümer (Freiburg, 1886), 392ff
P. Foucart: ‘Dionysiaci artifices’, Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, ed. C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, ii/1 (Paris, 1892/R), 246ff
F.J.F.A.L. Poland: ‘Technitai’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, 2nd ser., v (Stuttgart, 1934), 2473–558 [with references to earlier literature]
A. Pickard-Cambridge: The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford, 1953, rev. 2/1968 by J. Gould and D.M. Lewis)
G. Fleischhauer: Die Musikergenossenschaften im hellenistisch-römischen Altertum: Beiträge zum Musikleben der Römer (diss., U. of Halle, 1959)
G.M. Sifacis: ‘Organization of Festivals and the Dionysiac Guilds’, Classical Quarterly, lix (1965), 206–14
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967)
W.H. Gross: ‘Technitai’, Der kleine Pauly, ed. K. Ziegler and W. Sontheimer, v (Munich, 1975), 553–4
G. Wille: Einführung in das römische Musikleben (Darmstadt, 1977), 151–2
S. Michaelides: ‘Technitai Dionysou’, The Music of Ancient Greece: an Encyclopaedia (London, 1978), 321–3
THOMAS J. MATHIESEN