Hymn to Dionysus and Semele

The frame of the hymn about the Tyrrhenian pirates: they seized a young man on the shore, taking him for a king's son, and he turned into a lion while vines wound about the ship; the robbers leapt into the sea and became dolphins. The narrative is not on the card (seam […]), and the story itself is also listed in the Bacchic chorus of Seneca (seneca-bacchus-001).

Ἀμφὶ Διώνυσον … μνήσομαι — "concerning Dionysus … I shall remember". The preposition amphi with the accusative is a functional marker of an opening: citharodic preludes began this way, and from the first word a listener knew what kind of piece was coming.

The verb, moreover, is not "I sing" but "I shall remember". The singer neither composes nor praises — he recalls what is already known; the whole of this poetry rests on memory as a trade.

Hence the closing: "there is no way for one who has forgotten you to fashion sweet song". Forgetting is the only danger, and the thought is repeated in the first hymn (homeric-dionysus-001) in almost the same words. The singer pays the god in memory, and earns his living by it.