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About the dance itself, let this suffice; for it would be tasteless to prolong my discussion by taking up everything. What qualifications the dancer on his part ought to have, how he should have been trained, what he should have studied, and by what means he should strengthen his work, I shall now set forth for you, to show you that Dance is not one of the facile arts that can be plied without pains, but reaches to the very summit of all culture, not only in music but in rhythm and metre, and especially in your own favourite, philosophy, both physics and ethics. To be sure, Dance accounts philosophy’s inordinate interest in dialectics inappropriate to herself. From rhetoric, however, she has not held aloof, but has her part in that too, inasmuch as she is given to depicting character and emotion, of which the orators also are fond. And she has not kept away from painting and sculpture, but manifestly copies above all else the rhythm that is in them, so that neither Phidias nor Apelles seems at all superior to her.
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Before all else, however, it behoves her to enjoy the favour of Mnemosyne and her daughter Polymnia, and she endeavours to remember everything. Like Calchas in Homer, the dancer must know “what is, and what shall be, and was of old,”Iliad, I, 70. so thoroughly that nothing will escape him, but his memory of it all will be prompt. To be sure, it professes in the main to be a science of imitation and portrayal, of revealing what is in the mind and making intelligible what is obscure. What Thucydides said of Pericles in praising the man would also be the highest possible commendation of a dancer, “to know what is meet and express it;”Thucydides, IT, 60. and by expressing I mean the intelligibility of his postures. But his whole accoutrement for the work is ancient story, as I have said, and the prompt recollection and graceful presentation of it.
