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

DANCE AND BaLL-GamMeEs

which the suitors displayed their musical and social talents. Hippocleides, who had drunk heavily of wine, enchanted all by the fullness and wit of his whimsicalities. Rendered insolent thereby, he executed a lascivious dance to the accompaniment of flutes. Yet Cleisthenes, although he looked on with a gloomy air, kept his temper. But when Hippocleides mounted the table, and there performed yet more audacious dances, standing finally on his head, and gesticulating indecently with bare legs, his hoped-for father-in-law indignantly addressed him as follows: “O son of ‘Teisander, you have danced away your bride,” to which he replied: “ Hippocleides cares not,” and so left the hall laughing.

Even though the shamelessness here described took place so to say in private company, yet the dance was well enough known, and certainly would, according to our ideas, have been called indecent, and it was danced in full publicity. Of the same character were the earlier indecent dances at the festivals of Artemis and the dance of the Callabides, and further the notorious Sicinnis.1 The ancients were uncertain about the meaning of the name, but at least we know that the satyrs in the satyric drama were in the habit of dancing it, and that its grotesque movements and the defiant stripping off the clothes made it a dance that according to our ideas was one of positive indecency. The soft sounds of the flutes greatly contributed to the stimulating effect.

Equally indecent, or rather erotic, was the Cordax (Dion Cassius, lix, 27; Alciphron, iii, 18; Dem., u, 18; Bekker, Anecdota, IOI, 17, 267; Ath., xiv, 630e; Pausanias, vi, 22; Aristoph., Clouds, 532, 547; Lucian, Bacch.,1; Theophrastus, Characters, vi), which consisted chiefly of reeling backwards and

- See Ath., xiv, 630), for attempted explanations of the name. The most important passages that deal with it are: Dion. Halic., vii, 72, 1d; Clement Alexand., Paed., i, 7; Eurip., Cyclops, 37; Ath., i, 20; Xiv, 620d., 630; Pollux, iv, 99; Scholiast on Aristoph., Clouds, 540.

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