The Dance (61-65)

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.

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,[*] 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,

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-

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.