“The young of all animals,” he goes on to say, “cannot keep quiet, either in body or voice.  They must leap and skip and overflow with gamesomeness and sheer joy, and they must utter all sorts of cries.  But whereas animals have no perception of order or disorder in their motions, the gods who have been appointed to men as our fellow-dancers have given to us a sense of pleasure in rhythm and harmony.  And so they move us and lead our bands, knitting us together with songs and in dances, and these we call choruses.”  Nor was it only Apollo and Dionysos who led the dance.  Athena herself danced the Pyrrhic dance.  “Our virgin lady,” says Plato, “delighting in the sports of the dance, thought it not meet to dance with empty hands; she must be clothed in full armour, and in this attire go through the dance.  And youths and maidens should in every respect imitate her example, honouring the goddess, both with a view to the actual necessities of war and to the festivals.”

Plato is unconsciously inverting the order of things, natural happenings.  Take the armed dance.  There is, first, the “actual necessity of war.”  Men go to war armed, to face actual dangers, and at their head is a leader in full armour.  That is real life.  There is then the festal re-enactment of war, when the fight is not actually fought, but there is an imitation of war.  That is the ritual stage, the dromenon.  Here, too, there is a leader.  More and more this dance becomes a spectacle, less and less an action.  Then from the periodic dromenon, the ritual enacted year by year, emerges an imagined permanent leader; a daemon, or god—­a Dionysos, an Apollo, an Athena.  Finally the account of what actually happens is thrown into the past, into a remote distance, and we have an “aetiological” myth—­a story told to give a cause or reason.  The whole natural process is inverted.

And last, as already seen, the god, the first work of art, the thing unseen, imagined out of the ritual of the dance, is cast back into the visible world and fixed in space.  Can we wonder that a classical writer[49] should say “the statues of the craftsmen of old times are the relics of ancient dancing.”  That is just what they are, rites caught and fixed and frozen.  “Drawing,” says a modern critic,[50] “is at bottom, like all the arts, a kind of gesture, a method of dancing on paper.”  Sculpture, drawing, all the arts save music are imitative; so was the dance from which they sprang.  But imitation is not all, or even first.  “The dance may be mimetic; but the beauty and verve of the performance, not closeness of the imitation impresses; and tame additions of truth will encumber and not convince.  The dance must control the pantomime.”  Art, that is, gradually dominates mere ritual.

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