In such dramatic dancing the subject or plot was important. Here the weakness of the old Hellenic mythology became fatal. For it was the old myths that supplied the motives of religious dances as well as of the drama, and many of them were morally unsatisfactory. When a chorus of boys danced the _Birth-pangs of Semelé_, the most famous dithyramb of Timotheos, not unnaturally objections were raised. The new school of musicians and poets, which arose towards the end of the fifth century, tried to represent everything and anything in the most realistic way possible: their dancers had to imitate with voice and gesture “blacksmiths at the forge, craftsmen at work, sailors rowing and boatswains giving them orders, horses neighing, bulls bellowing,”[442] and so forth. They chose the commonest and coarsest scenes, just like Dutch painters. In their hands, dancing became something vulgar, as well as morally risky, though still under a semi-religious sanction. It is this charge which justified Plato’s denunciations of the dramatic element in poetry and music. It must be remembered that the choregos at Athens, who collected the boys from his tribe to dance these dithyrambs, could use compulsion if fathers refused to allow their sons to join his chorus.[443] Yet the advantages of learning to dance were great, quite apart from the religious aspects. Dancing was a scientifically designed system of physical training, which exercised every part of the body symmetrically.[444] The different masters invented systems of their own, just as the paidotribai invented systems of wrestling; in both cases the teaching began with a series of figures, which were afterwards fitted together. Different localities also had their own particular figures.[445] The solo dance was used for private exercise. It also made its way into the drama. Sometimes, too, in the choral performances one or two of the best dancers were singled out to perform more elaborate evolutions expressing the dramatic course of the subject. But the choral dance was universal throughout Hellas. Its motives ranged from the solemn religious questionings of Aeschylus to the drunken buffoonery of the vine-festivals. The dance might be the act of worship of a whole people, as in the great festivals at Delos. It might, like the Gumnopaidia at Sparta, be designed to exhibit the physical perfection and practise the military evolutions of a nation in arms. It might celebrate the triumphant return of an Olympian victor to his native city, as did many of the dances which accompanied the extant odes of Pindar. The chorus-songs of Tragedy and Comedy were set to dances of a sort; but from these last boys seem to have been excluded.