23
Therefore, you amazing fellow, take care that it isn’t impious to denounce a practice at once divine and mystic, cultivated by so many gods, performed in their honour, and affording at once amusement and profitable instruction in such degree!
23
Another thing surprises me in you, since I know that you are a great lover of Homer and Hesiod—I am going back, you see, to the poets once more— how you dare contradict them when they praise dancing above all things else. When Homer enumerated all that is sweetest and best—sleep, love, song, and danceIliad, XIII, 636 ff. —it was this alone that he called “blameless,” and what is more, he ascribes sweetness to song; but both these things pertain to the dancer’s art, both dulcet song and blameless dancing—which you now take it into your head to blame! And again, in another part of his poetry:Iliad, XIII, 730, 731. But after épynordy Lucian substitutes for ἐτέρῳ κίθαριν καὶ ἀοιδήν the close of Odyssey, I, 421. One man getteth from God the gift of achievement in warfare, One, the art of the dance, and song that stirreth the heart-strings. The Theogony. Singing combined with dancing does in truth stir the heart-strings, and it is the choicest gift of the gods. Also, it appears that in classifying all activities under two heads, war and peace, Homer has set off against those of war these, and: these only, as peerless.
24
As for Hesiod, who was not told by someone else about the dancing of the Muses but saw it himself at break of day, he begins his poem? by saying about them as the highest possible praise that they “dance with delicate footfall about the violet waters,” circling round the altar of their sire.
24
In spite of this, my high-spirited friend, you insult dancing almost to the point of quarrelling with the wade and yet Socrates
