The Dance (66-70)

In that connection I should like to tell you something that was said by another barbarian. Noticing that the dancer had five masks ready—the drama had that number of acts—since he saw but the one dancer, he enquired who were to dance and act the other roles, and when he learned that the dancer himself was to act and dance them all, he said; “I did not realise, my friend, that though you have only this one body, you have many souls.”

Well, that is the way the barbarian viewed it. And the Greeks of Italy quite appropriately call the dancer a pantomime, precisely in consequence of what he does.[*] That poetical precept,[*] “My son, in your converse with all cities keep the way of the sea-creature that haunts the rocks,” is excellent, and for the dancer essential; he must cleave close to his matters and conform himself to each detail of his plots.

In general, the dancer undertakes to present and enact characters and emotions, introducing now a lover and now an angry person, one man afflicted with madness, another with grief, and all this within fixed bounds. Indeed, the most surprising part of it is that within the selfsame day at one moment we are shown Athamas in a frenzy, at another Ino in terror; presently the same person is Atreus, and after a little, Thyestes; then Aegisthus, or Aerope; yet they all are but a single man.

Moreover, the other performances that appeal to eye and ear contain, each of them, the display of a single activity; there is either flute or lyre or vocal music or tragedy’s mummery or comedy’s buffoonery. The dancer, however, has everything at once, and that equipment of his, we may see, is varied and comprehensive—the flute, the pipes, the tapping of feet, the clash of cymbals, the melodious voice of the actor,[*] the concord of the singers.

Then, too, all the rest are activities of one or the other of the two elements in man, some of them activities of the soul, some of the body; but in dancing both are combined. For there is display of mind in the performance as well as expression of bodily development, and the most important part of it is the wisdom that controls the action, and the fact that nothing is irrational. Indeed, Lesbonax of Mytilene, a man of excellent parts, called dancers “handiwise,”[*] and used to go to see them with the expectation of returning from the theatre a better man. Timocrates, too, his teacher, one day, for the sole and only time, came in by chance, saw a dancer ply his trade and said: “What a treat for the eyes my reverence for philosophy has deprived me of!”

If what Plato[*] says about the soul is true, the three parts of it are excellently set forth by the dancer —the orgillous part when he exhibits a man in a rage, the covetous part when he enacts lovers, and the reasoning part when he bridles and governs each of the different passions; this last, to be sure, is disseminated through every portion of the dance just as touch is disseminated through the other senses.[*] And in planning for beauty and for symmetry in the figures of the dance, what else does he do but confirm the words of Aristotle, who praised beauty and considered it to be one of the three parts of the chief good?[*] Moreover, I have heard a man express an excessively venturesome opinion