live my follies o'er again

--_Id_

Cornelius Nepos, I think, mentions among the admirable qualities of the
great Epaminondas that he had an extraordinary talent for music and
dancing. Epaminondas accomplishing his jig must be accepted as a
pleasing and instructive figure in the history of the dance.

Lucian says that a dancer must have some skill as an actor, and some
acquaintance with mythology--the reason being that the dances at the
festivals of the gods partook of the character of pantomime, and
represented the most picturesque events and passages in the popular
religion. Religious knowledge is happily no longer regarded as a
necessary qualification for the dance, and, in point of fact no thing is
commonly more foreign to the minds of those who excel in it.

It is related of Aristides the Just that he danced at an entertainment
given by Dionysius the Tyrant, and Plato, who was also a guest, probably
confronted him in the set.

The "dance of the wine press," described by Longinus, was originally
modest and proper, but seems to have become in the process of time--and
probably by the stealthy participation of disguised prudes--a kind of
_can can_.

In the high noon of human civilization--in the time of Pericles at
Athens--dancing seems to have been regarded as a civilizing and refining
amusement in which the gravest dignitaries and most renowned worthies
joined with indubitable alacrity, if problematic advantage. Socrates
himself--at an advanced age, too--was persuaded by the virtuous Aspasia
to cut his caper with the rest of them.

Horace (Ode IX, Book I,) exhorts the youth not to despise the dance:

Nec dulcis amores
Sperne puer, neque tu choreas.

Which may be freely translated thus:

Boy, in Love's game don't miss a trick,
Nor be in the dance a walking stick.

In Ode IV, Book I, he says:

Jam Cytherea choros ducit, inminente Luna
Junctaeque Nymphis Gratiae decentes
Alterno terram quatiunt pede, etc.

At moonrise, Venus and her joyous band
Of Nymphs and Graces leg it o'er the land

In Ode XXXVI, Book I (supposed to have been written when Numida returned
from the war in Spain, with Augustus, and referring to which an old
commentator says "We may judge with how much tenderness Horace loved his
friends, when he celebrates their return with sacrifices, songs, and
dances") Horace writes

Cressa ne careat pul