The themes of tragedy and the dance are common to both, and there is no difference between those of the one and those of the other, except that the themes of the dance are more varied and more unhackneyed, and they contain countless vicissitudes.

If the dance does not feature in contests, I maintain that it is because the governors of the games thought the thing too important and too grand to be called into competition. I forbear to mention that a city in Italy, the fairest that belongs to the Chalcidian race, has added it, by way of embellishment, to the games that are held there.

The allusion is to Naples and to the important games instituted there by Augustus in 2 a.d., on which see R. M. Geer, “The Greek Games at Naples,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, LXVI (1935), especially n. 19 in regard to the inclusion of pantomimic contests. rR 2

At this point I should like to defend the numerous omissions in my account, that I may not create an impression that I lack sense or learning. I am not unaware that many before our time who have written about the dance have made it the chief matter of their essays to enumerate all its forms and list their names, telling what each is like and by whom it was discovered, thinking to make a display of wide learning thereby. But for my own part, first and foremost, I think that to be zealous about these things is tasteless, pedantic, and as far as I am concerned, out of place, and for that reason I pass them over.

Besides, I want you to understand and remember that the topic which I have proposed for myself at present is not to give the history of every form of the dance, and I have not taken it upon myself as the aim of my discussion to enumerate names of dances, except for the few that I mentioned at the outset, in touching upon the more characteristic of them. No, at present anyhow, the chief object of my discussion is to praise the dance as it now exists and to show how much that is pleasurable and profitable it comprises in its embrace, although it did not begin to attain such a height of beauty in days of old, but in the time of Augustus, approximately.

See Athenaeus I, 20D, where Bathyllus and Pylades are given as its inventors, on the authority of Aristonicus.

Those early forms were roots, so to speak, or initial stages, of the dance; but the flowering of it and the consummate fruition, which precisely at this moment has been brought to the highest point of perfection—that is what our discussion treats of, omitting the Tongs and the Crane-dance

The Tongs seems to have involved the performance of entrechats (Eustathius on Odyss., VIII, p. 1161). The Cranedance was said to have been first danced about the altar at Delos by Theseus and his companions, imitating the escape from the Labyrinth (Pollux, IV, 101).

About the dance itself, let this suffice; for it would be tasteless to prolong my discussion by taking up everything. What qualifications the dancer on his part ought to have, how he should have been trained, what he should have studied, and by what means he should strengthen his work, I shall now set forth for you, to show you that Dance is not one of the facile arts that can be plied without pains, but reaches to the very summit of all culture, not only in music but in rhythm and metre, and especially in your own favourite, philosophy, both physics and ethics. To be sure, Dance accounts philosophy’s inordinate interest in dialectics inappropriate to herself. From rhetoric, however, she has not held aloof, but has her part in that too, inasmuch as she is given to depicting character and emotion, of which the orators also are fond. And she has not kept away from painting and sculpture, but manifestly copies above all else the rhythm that is in them, so that neither Phidias nor Apelles seems at all superior to her.