Gregory Nazianzen, that eloquent theologian, tells how a noble friend formally invited him and other bishops to his daughter Olympia’s wedding. He declined: “For it is absurd to see an old, gouty bishop sitting among dancers.” He thought it unsuitable to be a spectator, still less a participant.

“No sober man dances,” Cicero writes: the man who dances is not sober. Perhaps for some such reason Domitian forbade Roman senators to dance, and expelled many from the Senate for doing so.

But these, you will say, are lewd and pagan dances. The abuse causes the harm, and therefore I am wrong to condemn, speak against or “unjustly accuse the best and pleasantest thing in human life,” as Lucian calls it.

You misunderstand me: I do not condemn it. I still regard it as an innocent amusement and a lawful recreation when practised at a suitable time, moderately and soberly. I agree with Plutarch: “What serves pleasure alone, innocent recreation or bodily exercise should not be rejected and despised.”

I agree with Lucian: “It is a graceful art that cheers the mind, exercises the body, delights its spectators and teaches many becoming gestures, appealing equally to the ears, the eyes and the soul itself.”

Sallust censures Sempronia’s singing and dancing, not because she sang or danced, but because she did so excessively: it is the abuse he condemns. Gregory’s refusal likewise condemns it only for certain people, not absolutely. Many will not allow men and women to dance together because it provokes lust. They might as well, with Lycurgus and Muhammad, cut down all vines and forbid wine because it makes some people drunk.

Nothing benefits us that cannot also harm us: What is more useful than fire?

I say of this what I say of all other innocent recreations: they are like fire, both good and bad. I see no harm sufficient to forbid such dancing, provided it is done at proper times and by suitable people. I conclude with Wolfgang Hider and most of our modern theologians: “If dances are becoming, dignified and modest, performed in full daylight in the presence of good men and respectable married women, and at a fitting time, they can and should be approved.”

“There is a time to mourn and a time to dance,” Ecclesiastes 3:4. Let them take their pleasures, then. As an ancient writer says: “Young men and maidens in the flower of their age, fair and lovely to see, well dressed and graceful in bearing, danced a Greek galliard. Keeping time as the dance required, they now turned, now stepped through its patterns, now moved apart, now together, now curtsied, then leaped,” and so on. Those intricate formations and flowing figures were a delightful sight.

The sun and moon, some say, dance around the earth, and the three outer planets around the sun as their centre: now stationary, now moving forwards, now backwards; now at apogee, then at perigee; now swift, then slow; westward, eastward. They turn, leap and tread their figures. Venus and Mercury dance around the sun with those thirty-three spots or Bourbonian planets, “dancing around the sun, the lyre-player,” as Fromundus says.

Four Medicean stars dance around Jupiter, two Austrian ones around Saturn, and so on; and all, presumably, to the music of the spheres.

Our greatest counsellors and most dignified senators sometimes dance, as David did before the Ark, in 2 Samuel 6:14; Miriam, in Exodus 15:20; and Judith, in Judith 15:13. Perhaps the Devil took his cue from this to introduce those bawdy bacchanals, but they may rightly dance.

The greatest soldiers, as Quintilian, Aemilius Probus and Caelius Rhodiginus have shown at length, continually practise it in Greece and Rome, as do the worthiest senators: “singing and dancing.” Lucian, Macrobius, Libanius, Plutarch, Julius, Pollux and Athenaeus have written full discussions in its praise. In our own age it is much sought after in those countries, as in all civilized commonwealths, as Alexander ab Alexandro has demonstrated at length in book 4, chapter 10, and book 2, chapter 25. Even among the barbarians nothing is more prized; the whole world approves it.

I scorn your wealth, King Croesus, and would sell Your Asia for perfumes, flowers, wine and dances.

Plato, in his Republic, would have dancing schools maintained so that young people could meet, become acquainted, see one another and be seen. More than that, he would have them dance naked, and mocks those who laugh at it.

But Eusebius, in Preparation for the Gospel, book 13, chapter 11, and Theodoret, in book 9 of his Cure of the Greek Maladies, rightly lash him for it; and well they may. As one writer says, “The very sight of naked parts causes immoderate and excessive desires, and stirs both men and women to burning lust.”

There is a proper measure in everything. This is my judgment in brief: dancing is a pleasant recreation for body and mind when it is sober and modest, as our Christian dances are, and practised at the proper time; but it is a fierce incitement to burning lust when unchastely abused, as it once was by the pagans. But I proceed.

If these enticements fail—for even Simierus, that great master of dalliance, could do no better—they will swear and lie, promise, protest, fabricate, counterfeit, boast, bribe, flatter and dissemble on every side, to move others more effectively and satisfy their own lust.