LYCINUS Well, Crato, this is a truly forceful indictment that you have brought, after long preparation, I take it, against dances and the dancer’s art itself, and besides against us who like to see that sort of show, accusing us of displaying great interest in something unworthy and effeminate ; but now let me tell you how far you have missed the mark and how blind you have been to the fact that you were indicting the greatest of all the good things in life. For that I can excuse you if, having been wedded to a rude creed from the first and considering only what is hard to be good, through unacquaintance with it all you have thought that it deserved indicting.

CRATO Who that is a man at all, a life-long friend of letters, moreover, and moderately conversant with philosophy, abandons his interest, Lycinus, in all that is better and his association with the ancients to sit enthralled by the flute, watching a girlish fellow play the wanton with dainty clothing and bawdy songs and imitate love-sick minxes, the most erotic of all antiquity, such as Phaedra and Parthenope and Rhodope,

Parthenope, the beloved of Metiochus the Phrygian, was the heroine of a lost romance; on the extant fragment, see New Chapters in the Hist. of Greek Lit., III, 238-240. Rhodope is probably the Thracian mentioned below in § 51, who married Haemus, her brother; they insolently likened themselves to Zeus and Hera, and were turned into the mountains known by their names.

“You will need, therefore, to do a great deal of pleading in your own defence, my fine fellow, when you confront the enlightened, if you wish to avoid being eliminated absolutely and expelled from the fold of the serious-minded. And yet the better course for you, I suppose, is to mend the whole matter b pleading not guilty and not admitting at all that you have committed any such misdemeanour. Anyhow, keep an eye to the future and see to it that you do not surprise us by changing from the man that you were of old to a Lyde or a Bacche. That would be a reproach not only to you but to us, unless, follow- ing the example of Odysseus, we can pull you away from your lotus and fetch you back to your wonted pursuits before you unwittingly fall quite under the spell of these Sirens in the theatre. But those other Sirens assailed only the ears, so that wax alone was needed for sailing past them; you, however, seem to have been subjugated from top to toe, through the eyes as well as the ears.

LYCINUS Heavens, Crato, what sharp teeth there are in this dog of yours that you have let loose on us! But as for your parallel, the simile of the Lotus-Eaters and the Sirens, it seems to me quite unlike what I have been through, since in the case of those who tasted the lotus and heard the Sirens, death was the penalty for their eating and listening, while in my case not only is the pleasure more exquisite by a great deal but the outcome is happy; I am not altered into forgetfulness of things at home or ignorance of my own concerns, but—if I may speak my mind without any hesitancy—I have come back to you from the theatre with far more wisdom and more insight into life. Or rather, I may well put it just as Homer does: he who has seen this spectacle Goes on his way diverted and knowing more than aforetime.Odyssey, XII, 188. CRATO Heracles, Lycinus! How deeply you have been affected! You are not even ashamed of it all but actually seem proud. In fact, that is the worst part of it: you do not show us any hope of a cure when you dare to praise what is so shameful and abominable.

LYCINUS Tell me, Crato, do you pass this censure upon dancing and what goes on in the theatre after having seen it often yourself, or is it that without being acquainted with the spectacle, you nevertheless account it shameful and abominable, as you put it? If you have seen it, you have put yourself on the same footing with us; if not, take care that your censure does not seem unreasonable and overbold when you denounce things of which you know nothing.

CRATO Why, is that what was still in store for me—with beard so long and hair so grey, to sit in the midst of a parcel of hussies and a frantic audience like that, clapping my hands, moreover, and shouting very unbecoming words of praise to a noxious fellow who doubles himself up for no useful purpose ?

LYCINUS This talk is excusable in your case, Crato. But if you would only take my word for it and just for the experiment’s sake submit, with your eyes wide open, T know very well that you could not endure not to get ahead of everyone else in taking up an advantageously placed seat from which you could see well and hear everything.

CRATO May I never reach ripeness of years if I ever endure anything of the kind, as long as my legs are hairy and my beard unplucked! At present I quite pity you; to the dismay of the rest of us, you have become absolutely infatuated !

LYCINUS Then are you willing to leave off your abuse, my friend, and hear me say something about dancing and about its good points, showing that it brings not only pleasure but benefit to those who see it; how much culture and instruction it gives; how it imports harmony into the souls of its beholders, exercising them in what is fair to see, entertaining them with what is good to hear, and displaying to them joint beauty of soul and body? That it does all this with the aid of music and rhythm would not be reason to blame, but rather to praise it.

CRATO I have little leisure to hear a madman praise his own ailment, but if you want to flood me with nonsense, I am ready to submit to it as a friendly service and lend you my ears, for even without wax I can avoid hearing rubbish. So now I will hold my peace for you, and you may say all that you wish as if nobody at all were listening.

LYCINUS Good, Crato; that is what I wanted most. You will very soon find out whether what I am going to say will strike you as nonsense. First of all, you appear to me to be quite unaware that this practice of dancing is not novel, and did not begin yesterday or the day before, in the days of our grandfathers, for instance, or in those of their grandfathers. No, those historians of dancing who are the most veracious can tell you that Dance came into being contemporaneously with the primal origin of the universe, making her appearance together with Love—the love that is age-old.

That is to say, the Hesiodean, cosmogonic Eros, elder brother of the Titans, not Aphrodite’s puny boy.

In the beginning, they say, Rhea, charmed with the art, ordered dances to be performed not only in ‘Phrygia by the Corybantes

The Corybantes, mentioned frequently by Lucian, are to him male supernatural beings (Timon, 41), alien denizens of Olympus like Pan, Attis, and Sabazius (Icarom., 27; cf. Parl. of the Gods, 9), whom Rhea attached to_herself because they too were crazy; in her orgies, one cuts his arm with a sword, another runs about madly, another blows the Phrygian horn, another sounds some instrument of percussion (Dial. Deor., 12, 1; cf. Tragodopod., 38). He does not ascribe to them any regular dance, or confuse them with the Curetes, as others often did.

Although I could mention many others among the heroes who were similarly trained and made an art of the thing, I consider Neoptolemus sufficient. Though the son of Achilles, he made a great name for himself in dancing and contributed to it the variety which is most beautiful, called Pyrrhic after him; and upon hearing this about his son, Achilles was more pleased, I am sure, than over his beauty and all his prowess. So, though till then Troy had been impregnable, his skill in dancing took it and tumbled it to the ground.

Since Neoptolemus was also called Pyrrhus, it was inevitable that the invention of the Pyrrhic dance should be ascribed to him. According to Archilochus (Fr. 190 Bergk), he originated it when he danced for joy over killing Eurypylus. That Achilles was more pleased to hear of this than when Odysseus told him of his son’s beauty and bravery (Odyssey, XI, 505-540) is known to us only from Lucian, as also the real reason for the fall of Troy. Lucian’s persiflage derives especial point from the fact that by this time the Pyrrhic had become anything but a war-dance. Athenaeus does not hesitate to call it Dionysiac (XIV, 6314) and compare it with the cordax.

The Spartans, who are considered the bravest of the Greeks, learned from Pollux and Castor to do the Caryatic, which is another variety of dance exhibited at Caryae in Lacedaemon,

This statement is decidedly unorthodox. Others say that the Spartans derived their war-dances from Castor and Pollux, and that Castor gave them a fine martial tune, the Kastoreion. It remained for Lucian to ask us to imagine the horse-tamer and his pugilistic twin, with basket-like contrivances on their heads, facing each other demurely and executing on tip-toe the graceful figures of the dance performed in honour of Artemis by the maidens of Caryae—the famous Caryatides! What these figures looked like is well known to us from ancient reliefs (cf. G. H. Chase, Loeb Collection of Arretine Pottery, Pl. III, No. 53, and the Albani relief in F. Weege, Der Tanz in der Antike, Fig. 52). Sculptural representations of the Caryatides in their statuesque poses, functioning as architectural supports, were so frequent that the name was extended to other similar figures just as it is now when it is applied to the Attic “Maidens” of the Erechtheum porch.

Even now you may see their young men studying dancing quite as much as fighting under arms. When they have stopped sparring and exchanging blow for blow with each other, their contest ends in dancing, and a flute-player sits in the middle, playing them a tune and marking time with his foot, while they, following one another in line, perform figures of all sorts in rhythmic step, now those of war and presently those of the choral dance, that are dear to Dionysus and Aphrodite.

That is why the song which they sing while dancing is an invocation of Aphrodite and of the Loves, that they may join their revel and their dances. The second of the songs, moreover—for two are sung—even contains instruction how to dance: “Set your foot before you, lads,” it says, “and frolic yet more featly,”

We have no knowledge of these two songs from any other sources. Lucian’s quotation from the second is given among the Carmina Popularia by Bergk (17) and Diehl (22).

The same sort of thing is done by those who dance what is called the String of Beads.

That is a dance of boys and girls together who move in a row and truly resemble a string of beads. The boy precedes, doing the steps and postures of young manhood, and those which later he will use in war, while the maiden follows, showing how to do the women’s dance with propriety ; fence the string is beaded with modesty and with manliness. In like manner their Bareskin Plays are dancing.

Very little is known about the Spartan “Bareskin Plays” except that they included processional choruses of naked youths which competed with each other in dancing and singing, in a place called the Chorus, near the agora.

Taking it that you have read what Homer has to say about Ariadne in “The Shield,” and about the chorus that Daedalus fashioned for her,

Iliad, XVIII, 593.

In Thessaly the cultivation of dancing made such progress that they used to call their front-rank men and champions “fore-dancers.”” This is demonstrated by the inscriptions upon the statues which they dedicated in honour of those who showed prowess in battle. “The citie,” they say, “hath esteemed him fore-dancer;” and again, “To Eilation the folk hath sett up thys ymage for that he danced the bataille well.”

No such inscriptions are known to us, and I fear there is little likelihood that the soil of Thessaly will ever confirm the testimony of Lycinus.

I forbear to say that not a single ancient mysterycult can be found that is without dancing, since they were established, of course, by Orpheus and Musaeus, the best dancers of that time, who included it in their prescriptions as something exceptionally» beautiful to be initiated with rhythm and dancing. To prove that this is so, although it behoves me to observe silence about the rites on account of the uninitiate, nevertheless there is one thing that everybody has heard; namely, that those who let out the mysteries in conversation are commonly said to “dance them out.”

At Delos, indeed, even the sacrifices were not without dancing, but were performed with that and with music. Choirs of boys came together, and while they moved and sang to the accompaniment of flute and lyre, those who had been selected from among them as the best performed an interpre- tative dance. Indeed, the songs that were written for these choirs were called Hyporchemes (interpretative dances), and lyric poetry is full of them.

That the “hyporchematic” style of dancing was interpretative, which in Lucian’s description of it is only implicit, is expressly stated by Athenaeus (I, 15 D).. In previously Forming to it as “dance accompanying song” (τὴν πρὸς τὴν ᾠδὴν ὄρχησις), he seems to agree with Lucian in the point that its ormers do not themselves sing. Elsewhere in his work (XIV, 6310) he gives a definition (from Aristocles) that is diametrically opposed: “when the chorus dances si Bad But this is connected with a highly theoretical classification of dances under six heads, three of which are dramatic (tragic, comic, satyric) and three lyric (pyrrhic, gymnopaedio, ype hematio). was we know that gymnopaedic c need singing,” it seems pretty clear that the definition of “hyporehematic ’» has been incorrectly transmitted in the text.

Yet why do I talk to you of the Greeks? Even the Indians, when they get up in the morning and pray to the sun, instead of doing as we do, who think that when we have kissed our hand the prayer is complete, face the sunrise and welcome the God of Day with dancing, posturing in silence and imitating the dance of the god; and that, to the Indians, is prayer and dance and sacrifice all in one. So they propitiate their god with those rites twice each day, when it begins and when it declines.

The Ethiopians, moreover, even in waging war, do it dancing, and an Ethiopian may not let fly the shaft that he has taken from his head (for they use the head in place of a quiver, binding the shafts about it like rays) unless he has first danced, menacing the enemy by his attitude and terrifying him in advance by his prancing.

Heliodorus i in the La opica (IX, 19) goes into greater detail. Cf. also H. P. L’Orange, Symbolae Osloenses XII (1934), 105-113, who calls attention to representations of Roman auxiliaries with arrows bound to their heads in the frieze of the Arch of Constantine.

Since we have spoken of India and of Ethiopia, it will repay us to make an imaginary descent into Egypt, their neighbour. For it seems to me that the ancient myth about Proteus the Egyptian means nothing else than that he was a dancer, an imitative fellow, able to shape himself and change himself into anything, so that he could imitate even the liquidity of water and the sharpness of fire in the liveliness of his movement; yes, the fierceness of a lion, the rage of a leopard, the quivering of a tree, and in a word whatever he wished. Mythology, however, on taking it over, described his nature in terms more paradoxical, as if he became what he imitated. Now just that thing is characteristic of the dancers to-day, who certainly may be seen changing swiftly at the cue and imitating Proteus himself. And we must suppose that in Empusa, who changes into countless forms, some such person has been handed down by mythology.

Empusa, one of Hecate’s associates, used to frighten people by appearing suddenly out of dark places in one orrid form or another; she seems to have been particularly given to manifesting herself with legs like those of an ass.

Next in order, it is proper that we should not forget that Roman dance which the best-born among them, called Salii (which is the name of a priesthood), perform in honour of Ares, the most bellicose of the gods—a dance which is at once very majestic and very sacred.