De saltatione

Lucian of Samosata

Lucian, Vol. 5. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.

To sum it up, he will not be ignorant of anything that is told by Homer and Hesiod and the best poets, and above all by tragedy.

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These are a very few themes that I have selected out of many, or rather out of an infinite number, and set down as the more important, leaving the rest for the poets to sing of, for the dancers themselves to present, and for you to add, finding them by their likeness to those already mentioned, all of which must lie ready, provided and stored by the dancer in advance to meet every occasion.

Since he is imitative and undertakes to present by means of movements all that is being sung, it is essential for him, as for the orators, to cultivate clearness, so that everything which he presents will be intelligible, requiring no interpreter. No, in the words of the Delphic oracle,[*](That given to Croesus, Herod., I, 47; there was, of course, no reference to dancing in it. The maid of Pytho vaunted her knowledge of the number of the sands and the measure of the sea and her ability to understand the mute and hear the silent, before demonstrating her power by replying to the testquestion “What is Croesus now doing” with the answer that she could smell turtle and lamb boiling in a bronze pot with a lid of bronze. That response, we are told, hit the mark. ) whosoever beholds dancing must be able “to understand the mute and hear the silent” dancer.

That is just what happened, they say, in the case of Demetrius the Cynic. He too was denouncing the dance just as you do, saying that the dancer was a mere adjunct to the flute and the pipes and the stamping, himself contributing nothing to the presentation but making absolutely meaningless, idle movements with no sense in them at all; but that people were duped by the accessories of the business—the silk vestments, the beautiful mask, the flute and its quavers, and the sweet voices of the singers, by all of which the dancer’s business, itself amounting to nothing at all, was embellished. Thereupon the dancer at that time, under Nero,

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in high repute, who was no fool, they say, and excelled, if ever a man did, in remembrance of legends and beauty of movement,[*](Probably the first of the several famous dancers who took Paris as their stage name, of whom the emperor, some said, was so jealous that he put him to death (Suetonius, Nero, 54). ) made a request of Demetrius that was very reasonable, I think—to see him dancing and then accuse him; he promised, indeed, to perform for him without flute or songs. That is what he did; enjoining silence upon the stampers and flute-players and upon the chorus itself, quite unsupported, he danced the amours of Aphrodite and Ares, Helius tattling, Hephaestus laying his plot and trapping both of them with his entangling bonds, the gods who came in on them, portrayed individually, Aphrodite ashamed, Ares seeking cover and begging for mercy, and everything that belongs to this story,[*](Homer, Odyssey, VIII, 266-320; cf. Lucian, Deor. Dial., 21 (17). ) in such wise that Demetrius was delighted beyond measure with what was taking place and paid the highest possible tribute to the dancer; he raised his voice and shouted at the top of his lungs: ‘I hear the story that you are acting, man, I do not just see it; you seem to me to be talking with your very hands!”

Since we are under Nero in fancy, I wish to tell the remark of a barbarian concerning the same dancer, which may be considered a very great tribute to his art. One of the barbarians from Pontus, a man of royal blood, came to Nero on some business or other, and among other entertainments saw that dancer perform so vividly that although he could not follow what was being sung—he was but half Hellenised, as it happened—he understood every-

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thing. So when it came to be time for him to go back to his own country, Nero, in saying good-bye, urged him to ask for anything that he wanted, and promised to give it him. “If you give me the dancer,’ said he, “you will please me mightily!” When Nero asked, “What good would he be to you there?”, he replied, “I have barbarian neighbours who do not speak the same language, and it is not easy to keep supplied with interpreters for them. If I am in want of one, therefore, this man will interpret everything for me by signs.” So deeply had he been impressed by that disclosure of the distinctness and lucidity of the mimicry of the dance.

The chief occupation and the aim of dancing, as I have said, is impersonating, which is cultivated in the same way by the rhetoricians, particularly those who recite these pieces that they call “exercises”; for in their case also there is nothing which we commend more highly than their accommodating themselves to the roles which they assume, so that what they say is not inappropriate to the princes or tyrant-slayers or poor people or farmers whom they introduce, but in each of these what is individual and distinctive is presented.