How deftly Phœbus strikes the golden lyre,
While strength and grace each moving limb inspire!

and Eumelus, or Arctinus, the Corinthian, somewhere or other introduces Jupiter himself as dancing, saying—

And gracefully amid the dancing throng,
The sire of gods and mortals moved along.

But Theophrastus says that Andron of Catana, a flute-player, was the first person who invented motions of the body keeping time to music, while he played on the flute to the dancers; from whom dancing among the ancients was called Sicelizing. And that he was followed by Cleophantus of Thebes. Among the dancers of reputation there was Bulbus, mentioned by Cratinus and Callias; and Zeno the Cretan, who was in high favour with Artaxerxes, mentioned by Ctesias. Alexander also, in his letter to Philoxenus, mentions Theodorus and Chrysippus.

41. The Temple of the Muses is called by Timon the Phliasian, the satiric writer, the basket, by which term he means to ridicule the philosophers who frequent it, as if they were fattened up in a hen-coop, like valuable birds:—

Ægypt has its mad recluses,
Book-bewilder'd anchorites,
In the hen-coop of the Muses
Keeping up their endless fights.

. . . . till these table orators got cured of their diarrhœa of words; a pack of men, who from their itch for talking appear to me to have forgotten the Pythian oracle, which Chamæleon quotes—

Three weeks ere Sirius burns up the wheat,
And three weeks after, seek the cool retreat
Of shady house, and better your condition
By taking Bacchus for your sole physician.

[[37]] And so Mnesitheus the Athenian says that the Pythia enjoined the Athenians to honour Bacchus the physician. But Alcæus, the Mitylenæan poet, says—

Steep your heart in rosy wine, for see, the dogstar is in view;
Lest by heat and thirst oppress'd you should the season's fury rue.