To illustrate, I should like to tell you about the cat-calls of a certain populace that is not slow to mark such points. The people of Antioch, a very talented city which especially honours the dance, keep such an eye upon everything that is done and said that nothing ever escapes a man of them. When a diminutive dancer made his entrance and began to play Hector, they all cried out in a single voice, “Ho there, Astyanax! where is Hector?” On another occasion, when a man who was extremely tall undertook to dance Capaneus and assault the walls of Thebes, “Step over the wall,” they said, “you have no need of a ladder!” And in the case of the plump and heavy dancer who tried to make great leaps, they said, “We beg you, spare the stage!’ On the other hand, to one who was very thin they called out: “Good health to you,” as if he were ill. It is not for the joke’s sake that I have mentioned these comments, but to let you see that entire peoples have taken a great interest in the art of dancing, so that they could regulate its good and bad points.
In the next place, the dancer must by all means be agile and at once loose-jointed and well-knit, so as to bend like a withe as occasion arises and to be stubbornly firm if that should be requisite.
That dancing does not differ widely from the use of the hands which figures in the public games—that it has something in common with the noble sport of Hermes and Pollux and Heracles, you may note by observing each of its mimic portrayals.
