The most famous paeans are those of Bacchylides and Pindar.
Paeans were sung at the festivals of Apollo (especially the Hyacinthia), at banquets, and later even at public funerals.
He is further credited by the scholiast on Aristophanes (loc. cit.) with having composed comedies, dithyrambs, epigrams, paeans, hymns, scolia, encomia and elegies; and he is the reputed author of a philosophical treatise on the mystic number three.
They have found themselves living in a new age of editiones principes, and have eagerly welcomed the first publication of Aristotle's Constitution of Athens (1891), Herondas (1891) and Bacchylides (1897), as well as the Persae of Timotheus of Miletus (5903), with some of the Paeans of Pindar (5907) and large portions of the plays of Menander (1898-1899 and 5907).
The older incantations, associated with Ea, were re-edited so as to give to Marduk the supreme power over demons, witches and sorcerers; the hymns and lamentations composed for the cult of Bel, Shamash and of Adad were transformed into paeans and appeals to Marduk, while the ancient myths arising in the various religious and political centres underwent a similar process of adaptation to changed conditions, and as a consequence their original meaning was obscured by the endeavour to assign all mighty deeds and acts, originally symbolical of the change of seasons or of occurrences in nature, to the patron deity of Babylon - the supreme head of the entire Babylonian pantheon.
