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Show RISE AND PROGRESS OF DANCING. 9 that it was they who brought it to perfection. These last seemed more than any other people destined by nature to practise it. They excelled in voluptuous dances. Dancing and music were more particularly cultivated by the Greeks than by the rest of the ancients. The Athenians were fond of the former in the extreme. Plato and Socrates approved of it; the Thessalians and Lacedemonians deemed it equal in rank, with any other of the fine arts 4. Cliophantes, of Thebes, and Eschylus greatly advanced the progress of dancing. The latter introduced it in his pieces, and, by uniting together all the imitative arts, gave the first models of theatrical representations. Painting had a great share in adding to their charm, and the pencil of Agatharcus, under the directions of that celebrated dramatist, traced the first ornaments of a stage. This Agatharcus wrote a work upon Scenic Architecture, which must have then been very valuable and useful. A few centuries afterwards, when the Romans exhibited magnificent and ravishing spectacles in the same style as the Greeks, dancing obtained the praises of Lucian, Apu-leius, Martial, Seneca, & c , and was especially practised in pantomimes, a sort of performance wholly unknown to the Greeks. These pieces were composed of comic or heroic subjects, expressed by gesture and dances. The names of Pyladus, and Bathyllus, the original authors of the pantomimic art, remain celebrated on the pages of history, as famous performers of these kind of ballets, then called Italic dances. " La Pantomime est due a l'antique Italie, Ou meme elle eclipsa Melpomene et Thalie." CHENIER. The Romans were all enraptured with these pantomimes and blessed the tyrant (Augustus), whose policy |