| Plato, Laws (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Pl. Leg.]. | ||
| <<Pl. Leg. 814c | Pl. Leg. 816c (Greek) | >>Pl. Leg. 818d |
815dto separate it off both from pacific and from warlike dancing, and to pronounce that this kind of dancing is unfitted for our citizens: and having thus disposed of it and dismissed it, we will now return to the warlike and pacific kinds which do beyond question belong to us. That of the unwarlike Muse, in which men pay honor to the gods and the children of the gods by dances, will consist, broadly speaking, of all dancing performed under a sense of prosperity: of this we may make two subdivisions—
815ethe one being of a more joyful description, and proper to men who have escaped out of toils and perils into a state of bliss,—and the other connected rather with the preservation and increase of pre-existent blessings, and exhibiting, accordingly, joyousness of a less ardent kind. Under these conditions every man moves his body more violently when his joys are greater, less violently when they are smaller; also, he moves it less violently when he is more sedate and better trained in courage,
816abut when he is cowardly and untrained in temperance, he indulges in greater and more violent changes of motion; and in general, no one who is using his voice, whether in song or in speech, is able to keep his body wholly at rest. Hence, when the representation of things spoken by means of gestures arose, it produced the whole art of dancing. In all these instances, one man of us moves in tune with his theme, another out of tune.
816bMany of the names bestowed in ancient times are deserving of notice and of praise for their excellence and descriptiveness: one such is the name given to the dances of men who are in a prosperous state and indulge in pleasures of a moderate kind: how true and how musical was the name so rationally bestowed on those dances by the man (whoever he was) who first called them all “Emmeleiai,” note and established two species of fair dances—the warlike, termed “pyrrhiche,”
816cand the pacific, termed “emmeleia”—bestowing on each its appropriate and harmonious name. These dances the lawgiver should describe in outline, and the Law-warden should search them out and, having investigated them, he should combine the dancing with the rest of the music, and assign what is proper of it to each of the sacrificial feasts, distributing it over all the feasts; and when he has thus consecrated all these things in due order, he should thenceforth make no change in all that appertains to either dancing or singing, but this
816done and the same city and body of citizens should continue in one and the same way, enjoying the same pleasures and living alike in all ways possible, and so pass their lives happily and well. What concerns the actions of fair and noble souls in the matter of that kind of choristry which we have approved as right has now been fully discussed. The actions of ugly bodies and ugly ideas and of the men engaged in ludicrous comic-acting, in regard to both speech and dance, and the representations given by all these comedians—all this subject we must necessarily consider and estimate. For it is impossible to learn the serious without the comic,
816eor any one of a pair of contraries without the other, if one is to he a wise man; but to put both into practice is equally impossible, if one is to share in even a small measure of virtue; in fact, it is precisely for this reason that one should learn them,—in order to avoid ever doing or saying anything ludicrous, through ignorance, when one ought not; we will impose such mimicry on slaves and foreign hirelings, and no serious attention shall ever be paid to it, nor shall any free man or free woman be seen learning it, and there must always be some novel feature in their mimic shows. note Let such, then, be the regulations for all those laughable amusements which we all call “comedy,”
817aas laid down both by law and by argument. Now as to what are called our “serious” poets, the tragedians,—suppose that some of them were to approach us and put some such question as this,—“O Strangers, are we, or are we not, to pay visits to your city and country, and traffic in poetry? Or what have you decided to do about this?” What would be the right answer to make to these inspired persons regarding the matter? In my judgment, this should be the answer, note—“Most excellent of Strangers,
817bwe ourselves, to the best of our ability, are the authors of a tragedy at once superlatively fair and good; at least, all our polity is framed as a representation of the fairest and best life, which is in reality, as we assert, the truest tragedy. Thus we are composers of the same things as yourselves, rivals of yours as artists and actors of the fairest drama, which, as our hope is, true law, and it alone, is by nature competent to complete.
817cDo not imagine, then, that we will ever thus lightly allow you to set up your stage beside us in the marketplace, and give permission to those imported actors of yours, with their dulcet tones and their voices louder than ours, to harangue women and children and the whole populace, and to say not the same things as we say about the same institutions, but, on the contrary, things that are, for the most part, just the opposite. In truth, both we ourselves and the whole State
817dwould be absolutely mad, were it to allow you to do as I have said, before the magistrates had decided whether or not your compositions are deserving of utterance and suited for publication. So now, ye children and offspring of Muses mild, do ye first display your chants side by side with ours before the rulers; and if your utterances seem to be the same as ours or better, then we will grant you a chorus, note but if not, my friends, we can never do so.”
| Plato, Laws (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Pl. Leg.]. | ||
| <<Pl. Leg. 814c | Pl. Leg. 816c (Greek) | >>Pl. Leg. 818d |
