In certain dramas of Phrynichos the Chorus represented a company of wrestlers,[983] who contrived by the quick, flexible, and varied movements of the dance, to imitate all the accidents of the palæstra. Sometimes they personated a party of scouts in the active look-out for the enemy, each with his right hand curved above the brow: this was one form of the Scops.[984] On other occasions the dancer mimicked the habits of the Scops, or mocking-owl, twirling about the head, and appearing to be absorbed in an ecstasy of imitation, until taken by the fowler. The performance of a piece like this, by a numerous Chorus, sometimes breaking off into a brisk gallopade, sometimes maintaining the same position, jigging, pirouetting, and ducking the crest, must, no doubt, have appeared infinitely comic; and yet it could have been nothing in comparison with the Morphasmos,[985] in which, not the characteristic peculiarities of a single owl, but those of the whole animal creation were “taken off.” Thus we may suppose that the Hegemon of the Chorus started as a baboon, his next-door neighbour as a hog, a third as a lion, a fourth as an ass, and so on, each man accommodating his voice to the character he had, pro tempore, assumed, and gibbering, grunting, roaring, braying, as he leaped, or gamboled, or bounded, or scampered about the orchestra. Anon the frisky foresters were transformed into slaves, who would seem to have been introduced to the audience pounding something, perhaps onions and garlick, in a mortar. ----- Footnote 983: Suid. v. Φρυνίχου πάλαισμα, t. ii. p. 1092. b. c. d. Footnote 984: Poll. iv. 103. Athen. xiv. 27. Footnote 985: Poll. iv. 103. Cf. Xenoph. Conviv. vi. 4. ----- The Oclasma,[986] a dance borrowed from the Persians, reminds one strongly of the performances of the negroes in the interior of Africa, the whole Chorus alternately crouching upon its heels, and springing aloft, like the frogs of Aristophanes about the fens of Acheron. Not, perhaps, un-akin to this, were those three frenzied dances, alluded to rather than described by the ancients,—that is to say, the Thermaustris,[987] which seems to have consisted of a series of violent bounds, like the performances of the Hurons and Iroquois;[988] the Mongas, which, from the name, probably represented the friskings and caracollings of a jackass; and the Kernophoros,[989] or dance of the first-fruits, wherein the Chorus appeared upon the stage, some bearing censers, others fruit-baskets, evidently in a character resembling that of Bacchanals. ----- Footnote 986: Poll. vi. 99. Footnote 987: Pfeiffer. Antiq. Græc. ii. 58. p. 382. Footnote 988: Cf. Dodwell, Classical Tour in Greece, vol. i. p. 133, seq. Footnote 989: Athen. xiv. 27. Poll. iv. 104. -----