stinguish the dancing
about which there is any doubt, from that about which there is no doubt.
Which is the doubtful kind, and how are the two to be distinguished?
There are dances of the Bacchic sort, both those in which, as they say,
they imitate drunken men, and which are named after the Nymphs, and Pan,
and Silenuses, and Satyrs; and also those in which purifications are
made or mysteries celebrated--all this sort of dancing cannot be rightly
defined as having either a peaceful or a warlike character, or indeed as
having any meaning whatever, and may, I think, be most truly described
as distinct from the warlike dance, and distinct from the peaceful, and
not suited for a city at all. There let it lie; and so leaving it to
lie, we will proceed to the dances of war and peace, for with these
we are undoubtedly concerned. Now the unwarlike muse, which honours in
dance the Gods and the sons of the Gods, is entirely associated with
the consciousness of prosperity; this class may be subdivided into two
lesser classes, of which one is expressive of an escape from some labour
or danger into good, and has greater pleasures, the other expressive of
preservation and increase of former good, in which the pleasure is less
exciting--in all these cases, every man when the pleasure is greater,
moves his body more, and less when the pleasure is less; and, again,
if he be more orderly and has learned courage from discipline he moves
less, but if he be a coward, and has no training or self-control, he
makes greater and more violent movements, and in general when he is
speaking or singing he is not altogether able to keep his body still;
and so out of the imitation of words in gestures the whole art of
dancing has arisen. And in these various kinds of imitation one man
moves in an orderly, another in a disorderly manner; and as the ancients
may be observed to have given many names which are according to nature
and deserving of praise, so there is an excellent one which they have
given to the dances of men who in their times of prosperity are moderate
in their pleasures--the giver of names, whoever he was, assigned to
them a very true, and poetical, and rational name, when he called them
Emmeleiai, or dances of order, thus establishing two kinds of dances of
the nobler sort, the dance of war which he called the Pyrrhic, and the
dance of peace which he called Emmeleia, or the dance of order; giving
to each their appropriate and becoming nam