Again, it seems to me that when you praise comedy and tragedy, you have forgotten that in each of them there is a special form of dance; that is to say, the tragic is the Emmeleia and the comic the Cordax, though sometimes a third form, the Sicinnis, is included also.

The Sicinnis, though regarded as the characteristic dance of the satyr-play, was sometimes presented in comedy.

As far as tragedy is concerned, let us form our first opinion of its character from its outward semblance. What a repulsive and at the same time frightful spectacle is a man tricked out to disproportionate stature, mounted upon high clogs, wearing a mask that reaches up above his head, with a mouth that is set in a vast yawn as if he meant to swallow up the spectators! I forbear to speak of pads for the breast and pads for the paunch, wherewith he puts on an adscititious, counterfeit corpulence, so that the disproportion in height may not betray itself the more conspicuously in a slender figure. Then too, inside all this, you have the man himself bawling out, bending forward and backward, sometimes actually singing his lines, and (what is surely the height of unseemliness) melodising his calamities, holding himself answerable for nothing but his voice, as everything else has been attended to by the poets, who lived at some time in the distant past. To be sure, as long as he is an Andromache or a Hecuba, his singing can be tolerated; but when he enters as Heracles in person and warbles a ditty, forgetting himself and taking no shame either for the lion-skin that he is wearing or for the club, a man in his right mind may properly term the thing a solecism.

I.e., it is in art what a solecism is in grammar.

And by the way, the charge you were bringing against the dance, that men imitate women, would be a common charge against both tragedy and comedy. Indeed, in them the female parts outnumber the male!

Moreover, comedy accounts the ridiculousness of the masks themselves as part of what is pleasing in her; for example, the masks of Davuses and Tibiuses,

Names of slaves in comedy.

On the other hand, that the appearance of the dancer is seemly and becoming needs no assertion on my part, for it is patent to all who are not blind. His mask itself is most beautiful, and suited to the drama that forms the theme; its mouth is not wide open, as with tragedy and comedy, but closed, for he has many people who do the shouting in his stead.

In the past, to be sure, they themselves both danced and sang; but afterwards, since the panting that came of their movement disturbed their singing, it seemed better that others should accompany them with song.