The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.