King, poetry, song, and dance are pictured as a kind of graduated scale of emotional expression. The passage, as translated by Dr. Legge, is as follows: "Poetry is the product of earnest thought. Thought cherished in the mind becomes earnest; exhibited in words it becomes poetry. The feelings move inwardly, and are embodied in words. When words are insufficient for them, recourse is had to sighs and exclamations. When sighs and exclamations are insufficient for them, recourse is had to the prolonged utterance of song. When these prolonged utterances of song are insufficient for them, unconsciously the hands begin to move and the feet to dance."
§ 34. Like the Indian and Chinese, the Greek symbolised the actions of battle in his dances. The dancers in the Pyrrhic dance even bore the same name as the practised and armed combatant (prulis);[1] and we learn from a passage in Plato's Laws[2] that this Pyrrhic dance imitated all the attitudes of defence—avoiding the thrust, retreating, springing up, crouching down and the opposite movements of attack with arrows and lances. We have now scanty means of estimating the perfection to which artistic dancing was brought in the progress of the Greek choral lyric save the complicated strophes and antistrophes of Pindar and the dramatic chorus. But the union of symbolic dance with choral song at the beginnings of Greek literature may be easily illustrated.
In the choral dance which Vulcan represents on the shield of Achilles we have clear indications of dramatic action accompanying the choral song, as it sometimes does in the dance-songs of the Russian Mirs. "At one time the youths and maidens dance round nimbly with measured steps, as when a potter tries his wheel whether
