74
I wish now to depict for you in words what a good dancer should be like in mind and in body. To be sure, I have already mentioned most of his mental qualities. I hold, you know, that he should be retentive of memory, gifted, intelligent, keenly inventive, and above all successful in doing the right thing at the right time; besides, he should be able to judge poetry, to select the best songs and melodies, and to reject worthless compositions.
75
What I propose to unveil now is his body, which will conform to the canon of Polyclitus. It must be neither very tall and inordinately lanky, nor short and dwarfish in build, but exactly the right measure, without being either fat, which would be fatal to any illusion, or excessively thin; for that would suggest skeletons and corpses.
76
To illustrate, I should like to tell you about the cat-calls of a certain populace that is not slow to mark such points. The people of Antioch, a very talented city which especially honours the dance, keep such an eye upon everything that is done and said that nothing ever escapes a man of them. When a diminutive dancer made his entrance and began to play Hector, they all cried out in a single voice, “Ho there, Astyanax! where is Hector?” On another occasion, when a man who was extremely tall undertook to dance Capaneus and assault the walls of Thebes, “Step over the wall,” they said, “you have no need of a ladder!” And in the case of the plump and heavy dancer who tried to make great leaps, they said, “We beg you, spare the stage!’ On the other hand, to one who was very thin they called out: “Good health to you,” as if he were ill. It is not for the joke’s sake that I have mentioned these comments, but to let you see that entire peoples have taken a great interest in the art of dancing, so that they could regulate its good and bad points.
