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 fact, the concord
of the heavenly spheres, the interlacing of the
errant planets with the fixed stars, their rhythmic
agreement and timed harmony, are proofs that
Dance was primordial. Little by little she has
grown in stature and has obtained from time to time
added embellishments, until now she would seem
to have reached the very height of perfection and
to have become a highly diversified, wholly harmonious, richly musical boon to mankind.
 
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. but in Crete by the
Curetes, from whose skill she derived uncommon
benefit, since they saved Zeus for her by dancing
about him; Zeus, therefore, might well admit that
he owes them a thank-offering, since it was through
their dancing that he escaped his father’s teeth.
They danced under arms, clashing their swords upon
their shields as they did so and leaping in a frantic,
warlike manner. This is Lucian’s only mention of the Curetes. His account of their dance agrees with representations in ancient art (cf..Kekulé-von Rohden, Archit. rém. Tonreliefe, Pl. 25) as well as with the description of Lucretius (I1, 629-639), who had seen it performed by mimic Curetes in the train of the Great Mother. Lucian’s use of the past tense (jv) suggests not only that his knowledge of them came from books but that he thought the dance obsolete. That, however, can hardly have been the case, for we have now a cletic hymn invoking (Zeus) Kouros, discovered at Palaecastro in Crete, which probably belongs to the cult with which the Curetes were connected, and is a late Imperial copy of an early Hellenistic text (Diehl, Anth. Lyr. Graeca, II, p. 279). Their dancing saved Zeus from being discovered and swallowed by his father Cronus because the clashing of their weapons drowned his infantine wailing. 





 

Thereafter, all the doughtiest of the Cretans
practised it energetically and became excellent
dancers, not only the common sort but the men of
princely blood who claimed leadership. For example,
Homer calls Meriones a dancer, not desiring to discredit but to distinguish him; and he was so conspicuous and universally known for his dancing that
not only the Greeks but the very Trojans, though
enemies, were aware of this about him. They saw,
I suppose, his lightness and grace in battle, which
he got from the dance. The verses go something
like this :

 Meriones, in a trice that spear of mine would have stopped you, Good as you are at the dance. Iliad, XVI, 617-618. 


Nevertheless, it did not stop him, for as he was well
versed in dancing, it was easy for him, I suppose,
to avoid the javelins they launched at him.
 
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. and they do
everything with the aid of the Muses, to the extent
of going into battle to the accompaniment of flute
and rhythm and well-timed step in marching;
indeed, the first signal for battle is given to the
Spartans by the flute. That is how they managed
to conquer everybody, with music and rhythm to
lead them. 
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.