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

DANCES, GAMES, MEALS

everywhere through the writings of the ancients we still possess several monographs on the art, and still at the present day numerous wall-pictures from Pompeii and vase-paintings enchant us by their indescribable beauty and inimitable grace no less than by the nobility of nakedness, partial or complete, of the youthful dancers, male and female.

A survey of the history of the Greek art of dancing, if only half complete, would make a book in itself. In accordance with the object of our sketch, we have to limit ourselves to those degenerate varieties of Greek dances, in which a sexual impulse shows itself more or less.

When we said that the Greeks were not acquainted with the society dance in our sense of the word, this remark needs to be supplemented by the statement that Plato (Laws, vi, 771e) appears to mean something at least resembling it, when he declares it to be desirable that on festive occasions young men and women should dance together, in order to get to know one another before marriage. This is the same passage in which he demands that the sexes should have more opportunity to see each other naked, “‘ so far at least as regard for modesty permits’; yet it is very questionable whether by Plato’s demand we are to understand the modern dance in couples, or whether, which at least seems more probable, it means that young men should perform their dances before the eyes of girls and vice versa. Yet even if he had demanded society dances such as are fashionable amongst ourselves, it is clear from the passage that they were not usual, at least in Attica; and it is nowhere handed down to us that they were common at a later date. No more does the well-known description on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad (xviii, 593 ff.) correspond to a modern society dance ; it is rather round dances of young men and women, who perform them, not separately, as is generally the case, but together : “There youths and maidens worth many oxen were

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