Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

CHAPTER V Dances, Games, Meats, ETC.

DANCE AND BaLt-Games. MEALS AND Drinkinc-Bovts. RicHTs oF HospitaLiry

Dances, which in ancient times were always an exhibition, may be regarded as theatrical productions in the wider sense. Antiquity is ignorant of the modern society dance, in the form in which couples of male and female dancers move to the sound of music for their own amusement. The dance of the Hellenes is the science of rhythm and mimic art ; that is, it is the bodily expression of an internal idea and works through movement as poetry through the word. Hence the Greek dance was a real art, no aimless turning round, but always the rhythmical representation of internal processes, in the expression of which all parts of the body, not least the hands and arms, participated. Hence the Greeks, rejoicing in beauty, took extraordinary delight in performances of the art of dancing, in which men diligently exercised their youth in order to make splendid their festivals and spectacles as also their banquets, drinking-bouts, and other private festivities. This was true even in oldest times ; the finds in Crete still speak to us to-day of the beautiful female dancers of the prehistoric /Egzan period and their very free clothing ; and Homer (Od., viii, 263 ff.; 370 ff. ; monographs by Lucian and Libanius: see also Ath., xiv, 628) several times mentions rhythmic dances, intended to amuse and give pleasure to the spectators. During the whole period of ancient civilization we find dances as the exhibition of bodily beauty and graceful movement throughout literature and in plastic and pictorial art; apart from the mention of them scattered

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