DANCES. 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 [Greek: skôpeumata] 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,[1] 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 ([Greek: apo tou seiesthai]), 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
- ↑ See Herodotus, i. 55.
