st number of
the figurers were forty or fifty. Their dresses were magnificent
and in taste. Their decorations were sublime. A competent skill
in the theatrical, or actor's art, and a great one in that of
dancing, was necessary for being admitted into the number of
figurers. In short, every thing was in the highest order, and
very fit to prove the mistake of those who imagine that the
dances are, in operas for example, no more than a kind of
necessary expletive of the intervals of the acts, for the repose
of the singers.

The Greeks considered dancing in another point of light; all
their festivals and games, which were in greater number than
in other countries, were intermixed and heightened with dances
peculiarly composed in honor of their deities. From before
their altars, and from their places of worship, they were soon
introduced upon their theatres, to which they were undoubtedly
a prior invention. The strophe, antistrophe, and epode, were
nothing but certain measures performed by a chorus of dancers,
in harmony with the voice; certain movements in dancing
correspondent to the subject, which were all along considered
as a constitutive part of the performance. The dancing even
governed the measure of the stanzas; as the signification of the
words strophe and antistrophe, plainly imports, they might be
properly called danced himns. The truth is, that tragedy and
comedy, made also originally to be sung, but which, in process
of time, upon truer principles of nature, came to be acted and
declaimed, were but super-inductions to the choruses, of which,
in tragedy especially, the tragic-writers, could not well get
rid, as being part of the religious ceremony.

This solves, in a great measure, the seeming absurdity of their
interference with the subject of the drama: being deemed so
indispensable a part of the performance, that the scene itself
was hardly more so: consequently, there was no secret supposed
to be more violated by speaking before them, than before the
inanimate scene itself. But what was at least excusable, on this
footing, in the antients, would be an unpardonable absurdity in
the moderns.

Athenaeus, who has left us an account of many of the antient
dances, as the _Mactrismus_, a dance entirely for the female
sex, the _Molossic_, the Persian _Sicinnis_, &c. observes, that
in the earliest ages of antiquity, dancing was esteemed an
exercise, not only not inconsistent with decency and gravity,
but prac