of a dance or a procession, because dances and processions
are not an integral part of our national life, and do not call up any
very strong and instant emotion. The old instinct lingers, it is true,
and emerges at critical moments; when a king dies we form a great
procession to carry him to the grave, but we do not dance. We have court
balls, and these with their stately ordered ceremonials are perhaps the
last survival of the genuinely civic dance, but a court ball is not
given at a king's funeral nor in honour of a god.

But to the Greek the god and the dance were never quite sundered. It
almost seems as if in the minds of Greek poets and philosophers there
lingered some dim half-conscious remembrance that some of these gods at
least actually came out of the ritual dance. Thus, Plato,[48] in
treating of the importance of rhythm in education says: "The gods,
pitying the toilsome race of men, have appointed the sequence of
religious festivals to give them times of rest, and have given them the
Muses and Apollo, the Muse-Leader, as fellow-revellers."

"The young of all animals," he goes on to say, "cannot keep quiet,
either in body or voice. They must leap and skip and overflow with
gamesomeness and sheer joy, and they must utter all sorts of cries. But
whereas animals have no perception of order or disorder in their
motions, the gods who have been appointed to men as our fellow-dancers
have given to us a sense of pleasure in rhythm and harmony. And so they
move us and lead our bands, knitting us together with songs and in
dances, and these we call _choruses_." Nor was it only Apollo and
Dionysos who led the dance. Athena herself danced the Pyrrhic dance.
"Our virgin lady," says Plato, "delighting in the sports of the dance,
thought it not meet to dance with empty hands; she must be clothed in
full armour, and in this attire go through the dance. And youths and
maidens should in every respect imitate her example, honouring the
goddess, both with a view to the actual necessities of war and to the
festivals."

Plato is unconsciously inverting the order of things, natural
happenings. Take the armed dance. There is, first, the "actual necessity
of war." Men go to war armed, to face actual dangers, and at their head
is a leader in full armour. That is real life. There is then the festal
re-enactment of war, when the fight is not actually fought, but there is
an imitation of war. That is the ritual stage, the _dromenon_. H