Are these then my roses, are these then my violets?
And is this my beautiful parsley?
DANCES.
Among the Syracusans there was a kind of dance called the Chitoneas, sacred to Diana, and it is a peculiar kind of dance, accompanied with the flute. There was also an Ionian kind of dance practised at drinking parties. They also practised the dance called ἀγγελικὴ at their drinking parties. And there is another kind of dance called the Burning of the World, which Menippus the Cynic mentions in his Banquet. There are also some dances of a ridiculous character:—the Igdis, the Mactrismus, the Apocinus, and the Sobas; and besides these, the Morphasmus, and the Owl, and the Lion, and the Pouring out of Meal, and the Abolition of Debts, and the Elements, and the Pyrrhic dance. And they also danced to the accompaniment of the flute a dance which they called the Dance of the Master of the Ship, and the Platter Dance.
The figures used in dances are the Xiphismus, the Calathismus, the Callabides, the Scops, and the Scopeuma. And the Scops was a figure intended to represent people looking out from a distance, making an arch over their brows with their hand so as to shade their eyes. And it is mentioned by Æschylus in his Spectators:—
And all these old σκωπεύματα of yours.
And Eupolis, in his Flatterers, mentions the Callabides, when he says—
He walks as though he were dancing the Callabides.
Other figures are the Thermastris, the Hecaterides,[74] the Scopus, the Hand-down, the Hand-up, the Dipodismus, the Taking-hold of Wood, the Epanconismus, the Calathiscus, the Strobilus. There is also a dance called the Telesias; and this is a martial kind of dance, deriving its title from a man of the name of Telesias, who was the first person who ever danced it, holding arms in his hands, as Hippagoras tells us in the first book of his treatise on the Constitution of the Carthaginians.
28. There is also a kind of satyric dance called the Sicinnis, as Aristocles says in the eighth book of his treatise on Dances; and the Satyrs are called Sicinnistæ. But some say that a barbarian of the name of Sicinnus was the inventor of it, though others say that Sicinnus was a Cretan by birth; and certainly the Cretans are dancers, as is mentioned by Aristoxenus. But Scamon, in the first book of his treatise on Inventions, says that this dance is called Sicinnis, from being shaken (ἀπὸ τοῦ σείεσθαι), and that Thersippus was the first person who danced the Sicinnis. Now in dancing, the motion of the feet was adopted long before any motion of the hands was considered requisite; for the ancients exercised their feet more than their hands in games and in hunting; and the Cretans are greatly addicted to hunting, owing to which they are swift of foot. But there are people to be found who assert that Sicinnis is a word formed poetically from κινησις,[75] because in dancing it the Satyrs use most rapid movements; for this kind of dance gives no scope for a display of the passions, on which account also it is never slow.