LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 23 admires not the sweetness of their voices, or the excellence of their singing, but the rap : d motions of their feet*. At the same time, the reader must guard against a misapprehension of the terms fxoXin'i and fttXTreadai, which, although they are sometimes applied to persons dancing, as to the chorus of Artemis t, and to Artemis herself J, neverthe- less are not always connected with singing, hut express any measured and graceful movement of the body, as for instance even a game at ball §. When, however, the Muses are described as singing in a chorus , they are to be considered only as standing in a circle, with Apollo in the centre as citharist, but not as also dancing : in the procemium to the Theogony of Hesiod, they are described as first dancing in chorus on the top of Helicon, and afterwards as moving through the dark, and singing the race of the immortal gods. In the dances of the choruses there appears, from the descriptions of the earliest poets, to have been much variety and art, as in the choral dance which Vulcan represented on the shield of Achilles % : — " At one time the youths and maidens dance around nimbly, with measured steps, as when a potter tries his wheel whether it will run ; at another, they dance in rows opposite to one another (a dance in a ring alternately with one in rows). Within this chorus sits a singer with the phorminx, and two tumblers (Kv(3i<TTrjrripe, the name being derived from the violent motions of the body practised by them) turn about in the middle, in accordance with the song." In a chorus celebrated by the gods, as described in one of the Homeric hymns**, this latter part is performed by Ares and Hermes, who gesticulate (nul^ovai) in the middle of a chorus formed by ten goddesses as dancers, while Apollo plays on the cithara, and the Muses stand around and sing. It cannot be doubted that these Kv/3i<JTJ|riJp£C, or tumblers (who occurred chiefly in Crete, where a lively, and even wild and enthusiastic style of dancing had prevailed from early times), in some measure regulated their ges- tures and motions according to the subject of the song to which they danced, and that a choral dance of this kind was, in fact, a variety of hyporcheme (yir6pyj>ll- ia )-> as a species of choral dances and songs was called, in which the action described by the song was at the same time represented with mimic gestures by certain individuals who came forward
- p.ag/x,Kgwyu) <robojv. — Oilyssey, vi'ii. 265.
f Iliad, xvi. 182. J Hymn. Pyth. Apoll. 19. § aurap xii ffi'-ou rdp<phv df/.ua.t rt xod awry), fftpuipn rai r ag i?ra.tZ,ov uiro xpr$ifji,ia. fiuXovirui. rn<ri ti ttuu/rixua XivxwXivo; yipw 70 f*o&%s. — Odyssey, vi. 101. Compare Iliad, xviii. 604: "hole* 3c xvfii<Trr,rr^i xar aureus (toXwri; i'^tip^ovTis ihtviuov xa.ro. jjuitranui. || Hesiod. Scut. 201— 205. % Iliad, xviii. 591 — 606. Compare Odyssey, iv. 17 — 19. It is doubtful whether the latter part of the description in the Iliad has not been improperly introduced into the text from the passage in the Odyssey. — Editor.
- Hymn, Horn, ad Appll. Pyth. 10 —26.
