Dancing was equal, and often combined, with singing, and was held in the highest estimation by the upper classes, and even the philosophers of ancient Greece; though of course only in its higher branches, the lower being usually abandoned to paid performers, as we to-day draw a wide distinction between a fashionable ball-room dance, and a ballet, though both are called dancing.
Skill in dancing, was a most envied accomplishment, for it meant both grace, and the talent of expressing all emotions without words.
Lucian[55] says the real art of the dance is to express an action, and gives a long list of mythological and historical deeds which were suited to representation. “The dancer” he says “must understand history, mythology, rhetoric,” etc.
One person performed the whole dance, no matter how many characters were included in the action, and therefore he had to change his dress sometimes with much rapidity. The Proteus of the fables, is imagined to have been only a dancer skilled in sudden changes.
The philosophers not only praised, but practised the art. Plato led a chorus of dancing boys; and considered those to be rough, uncouth churls who disliked so pleasant a gift of the gods.[56]
Alcibiades danced in public, arrayed in great splendor. Sophocles was a celebrated dancer, and leader of dancing; while yet a boy, after the Greek victory at Salamis, he is said to have danced (according to some, naked) before the trophies.
Socrates often entertained his guests with dancing, and studied it himself at an advanced age.[57]
Exact information respecting the dance is lacking, some commentators deeming it to have been very like our modern ballet, others maintaining that there was a vast difference; Czerwinski and Wieland hold the former opinion, and to all appearance justly. Some erudite writers have endeavored to give the most circumstantial accounts of the ancient manner of dancing.
Meibomius, one of the earliest writers on this subject, endeavored to dance an ancient Greek dance to an ancient Greek tune, before the court of Sweden, and Scaliger in the sixteenth century danced the Pyrrhic dance fully armed, before the Emperor Maximilian;[58] both assumed far too much knowledge in the matter.
There were undoubtedly numerous dancing schools, and possibly also some set figures prescribed in certain dances, but these figures had no names attached to them, and cannot be determined with certainty. The time was marked as in chorus, by a leader, tapping on the floor with heavy iron shoes. There are indications that a dance similar to the Virginia reel, and other contra dances were known to them; also a dance which resembled the game of “follow-my-leader,” where all imitated the postures and gestures of a leader.