The Works of Lucian of Samosata — Volume 02Lucian, of Samosata
Philosophy
The Works of Lucian of Samosata — Volume 02
Lucian, of Samosata
Lucian, of Samosata -- Translations into English
unseemly, and selects others for his recommendation.
Of dancing then, in the strict sense of the word, I have said enough. To
enlarge further upon its history would be pedantic. And now I come to the
pantomime. What must be his qualifications? what his previous training?
what his studies? what his subsidiary accomplishments? You will find that
his is no easy profession, nor lightly to be undertaken; requiring as it
does the highest standard of culture in all its branches, and involving a
knowledge not of music only, but of rhythm and metre, and above all of
your beloved philosophy, both natural and moral, the subtleties of
dialectic alone being rejected as serving no useful purpose. Rhetoric,
too, in so far as that art is concerned with the exposition of human
character and human passions, claims a share of its attention. Nor can it
dispense with the painter's and the sculptor's arts; in its close
observance of the harmonious proportions that these teach, it is the
equal of an Apelles or a Phidias. But above all Mnemosyne, and her
daughter Polyhymnia, must be propitiated by an art that would remember
all things. Like Calchas in Homer, the pantomime must know all 'that is,
that was, that shall be'; nothing must escape his ever ready memory.
Faithfully to represent his subject, adequately to express his own
conceptions, to make plain all that might be obscure;--these are the
first essentials for the pantomime, to whom no higher compliment could be
paid than Thucydides's tribute to Pericles, who, he says, 'could not only
conceive a wise policy, but render it intelligible to his hearers'; the
intelligibility, in the present case, depending on clearness of
gesticulation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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