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. Athenæus, 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 practised by persons of the greatest worth and honor. Socrates himself, learnt the art, when he was already advanced in years. Cautious as I am of using a false argument, I should say, that the making dances a part of their religious ceremonies, was a mark of their attributing even a degree of sanctity to them; but that I am aware there were many things that found a place in their festivals and games, which, among those heathens, were so far from having any thing of sacred in them, that they did not even show a respect for common decency or morality.