Περὶ Ὀρχήσεως

Lines

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İngilizce İngilizce Yunanca

66 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.”

67 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.The name signifies one who mimics everything. That poetical precept,Pindar, Fr. 43 (173) Schroeder; the reference is to the cuttle, which was supposed to take protective colouring to match its background. Cf. Theognis, 215-218. “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.

67 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.