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Those early forms were roots, so to speak, or initial stages, of the dance; but the flowering of it and the consummate fruition, which precisely at this moment has been brought to the highest point of perfection—that is what our discussion treats of, omitting the Tongs and the Crane-danceThe Tongs seems to have involved the performance of entrechats (Eustathius on Odyss., VIII, p. 1161). The Cranedance was said to have been first danced about the altar at Delos by Theseus and his companions, imitating the escape from the Labyrinth (Pollux, IV, 101). and so forth as no longer having anything to do with the dancing of to-day. And as to that “Phrygian” form of the dance, the one that accompanied wine and revelry, performed amidst drunkenness, generally by peasants who executed, to the music of flutes played by women, violent and trying gambols still prevalent in the country districts, that too I have not omitted out of ignorance but because those gambols have nothing to do with our present dance. As you know, Plato in the Laws praises certain forms of the dance, but strongly condemns certain others, dividing them with reference to what is pleasurable and profitable and rejecting the more unseemly sorts, but valuing and admiring the rest.Laws, VII, 814-816 c.
