Some few facts have been recorded concerning the history of dancing in connexion with the drama. In the earliest times it consisted mainly of movements with the feet. The use of the hands and arms in dancing, and the introduction of elaborate gesticulation, was a development due to a later period.[942] In the old-fashioned dramas of Thespis and his immediate successors dancing necessarily played a very important part. Both tragedy and comedy were at that time mainly lyrical, and the long choral odes were accompanied throughout by dances. The early dramatists, such as Thespis, Phrynichus, Pratinas, and Cratinus, were called ‘dancers’ as well as poets, because one of their principal duties consisted in training their choruses in the art of dancing.[943] Phrynichus, in an epigram of which two verses are still preserved, boasts of having discovered more figures in dancing than there are waves in a stormy sea.[944] The tragic dance of the sixth century, to judge from the specimens given by Philocleon at the end of the Wasps, was of a wild and lively character.[945] The tone of solemnity, by which it was afterwards distinguished, was due to the innovations of Aeschylus. It was probably in the time of Aeschylus that dancing in tragedy reached its highest pitch of excellence. His long choruses gave ample opportunities for the display of the dancer’s skill. Moreover, the training of the chorus was personally superintended by Aeschylus, and he is said to have himself invented a great number of postures and attitudes to be used in dancing.[946] Towards the end of the fifth century the art appears to have declined in significance, along with the general decrease in the importance of the chorus. It began to lose something of its mimetic character. Plato, the comic poet, who flourished at the end of the fifth century, contrasts the mediocrity of the choral dancing in his day with the excellence of that of a former period. In old times, he says, a good dancer was a sight worth seeing; but the choreutae of the present day stand in a row, like so many cripples, and bawl out their songs, without any attempt at appropriate motions and gestures.[947] This deterioration was a necessary consequence of the tendency to thrust the chorus more and more into the background.