had a principal
share.

The antients have left us an unaccountable description of the
Bacchanalians, whose deportment forms a striking contrast to
the decent regularity observed in the worship of Diana. The
Bacchanalians strolled the country, and, in the course of that
vagabond scheme, erected temporary huts, their residence being
always short wherever they came. In their intoxication they
seemed to defy all decency and order; affecting noise, and
a kind of tumultuous, boisterous joy, in which there could
never be any true pleasure or harmony. They were, in the
licentiousness of their manners, a nuisance to society; which
they scandalized and disturbed by their riots, their mad
frolics, and even by their quarrels. Their heads and waists were
bound with ivy, and in their hands they brandished a thirsus, or
kind of lance, garnished with vine-leaves. When by any foulness
of weather they were driven into their huts, they passed their
time in a kind of noisy merriment, of shoutings and dithirambic
catches, accompanied by timpanums, by cymbals, by sistrums, and
other instruments, in which noise was more consulted than music,
and corresponded to the sort of time they kept to them, in the
frantic agitations of their Bacchic enthusiasm. The Corybantes
were called so from their disorderly dancing as they went along.

The Pirrhic dance differs not much from Plato's military dance.
The invention of it is most generally attributed to Pirrhus, son
of Achilles; at least this opinion is countenanced by Lucian, in
his treatise upon dancing; though it is most probably derived
from the Memphitic dance of Egypt. The manner of it was to dance
armed to the sound of instruments. Xenophon takes notice of
these dances in armour, especially among the Thracians, who were
so warlike a people. In their dance to music, they exhibited the
imitation of a battle. They executed various evolutions; they
seemed to wound each other mortally, some falling down as if
they had received their death-wound; while those who had given
the blow sung to the song of triumph, called _Sitalia_, and
then withdrew, leaving the rest to take up their seeming dead
comrade, and to make preparations for his mock-funeral, in the
pantomime stile of dance. He has also described the dance of the
Magnesians, in which they represented their tilling the ground,
in an attitude, and in readiness for defence, against expected
moroders. They put themselves in a posture of protecti