The Romans had a proverb that went ‘The matter is safe: the old man dances.’ What to make of such a saying? There was, apparently, a positive, salutary role for dance in Roman society, so much so that the success or failure of an enterprise could depend on it, perhaps even the wellbeing of an entire community. The ancients themselves explained the proverb by situating it in a precise place and moment in time: the first festival dedicated to the god Apollo, in 212 BCE.
It was a very dangerous year for Rome. The Carthaginian general Hannibal, their greatest enemy, was bearing down upon southern Italy, threatening to destroy the Republic. The festival, aimed to assure divine protection, was held at the Great Circus, a large area in the middle of Rome where cult practices, horse races and mass entertainment intersected. During the ritual, Livy tells us, ‘the people watched wearing garlands, and women said prayers’. But the grammarian Festus explains that, upon hearing that the Carthaginians were approaching, people left the Circus in a hurry in order to fight the enemy. When they came back, they discovered that an old man had been dancing all along and exclaimed the words that became proverbial: ‘The matter is safe: the old man dances.’ Hannibal came close, but he never conquered Rome.
Dance is a virtually universal phenomenon; some form of it is probably known by all peoples of all times (and, indeed, by some nonhuman animals). But as a cultural practice, dance is firmly anchored in specific historical and social contexts. It can therefore tell us something about the culture in which it is performed. Though the dances of the past are difficult to study, in the case of ancient Rome we possess a wealth of indirect sources – texts, images, artefacts – that allow us to examine, if not the living practice itself, at least the meanings that were attached to it.
In ancient Rome, dance was ubiquitous. It was practised and watched everywhere, including during religious rituals (such as those performed in honour of Apollo), on the theatrical stage and in private houses. It was the object of nuanced reflections on the part of Roman philosophers and poets. Careful study of their texts yields hints as to what they thought dance accomplished and gets us closer to understanding Roman culture and religion, especially in its performative dimensions. What can we learn today about the Romans and their religion when we study their reflections on dance?
To return to the story about the old man, there is something more at stake than a dance that is understood as an expression of joy or a hope for a positive outcome. By keeping up his dance, the old man had protected the correct form of the ritual dedicated to Apollo. It is not clear whether we should imagine the old man as a priest; one source describes him as a mime named Gaius Pomponius. But it’s beside the point to look for historical accuracy in an ancient story that was meant to explain a proverb. What matters is that the story singles out dance as the one component of a religious ritual capable of standing in for the ritual as a whole and of safeguarding its form. The slightest departure from the prescribed form of a ritual would invalidate its execution, a failure that could be interpreted as a bad omen. The old man’s dance did not alter the ritual, it only drew it out as long as needed. The reason that the dance was able to do so was because, according to ancient philosophers, dance was a praxis (practice) – an activity that does not produce anything beyond itself. This makes it different from, say, placing an offering on an altar, an action that produces a result, or even from singing a song, where the song is understood as the product of singing (in Greek, a poiesis, which means a ‘making’). It is the practice of dance that represents the ritual as a whole and, at least in this tale, it is the key to maintaining peace with the gods and ensuring their goodwill.
In a ritual context, then, dance has entirely positive connotations. But taken out of that context, the figure of the old man dancing is surprising. It seems to bely a widespread stereotype, ancient and modern, of the Roman citizen as a stern, uptight man who is averse to bodily pleasures. This stereotype was very much cultivated by the Romans themselves. They loved to advocate the simplicity of the old ways and to count dance among the cultural practices that were essentially foreign and harmful to the Roman ethos, despite the firmly established role of dance in Roman religion. The tension between positive and negative connotations of dance that arises is quite characteristic of the Roman approach to dance.
According to Livy, writing around the beginning of 1st century CE, the dances that gradually led to the development of a Roman theatre culture were tied to another moment of crisis in the city of Rome: a pandemic that struck the city in the 360s BCE. When all other measures to contain the danger failed, the Romans, won over by superstition, sent for dancers from neighbouring Etruria, who came to Rome to perform simple dances to appease the gods. They were accompanied by pipers. Song was added at a later stage, bringing about an effort to coordinate words and movements and, eventually, a division of labour between dancers and singers. Even though Livy writes that the imported dances could neither cure the Romans of their fear of the gods nor heal their bodies, he appreciates the sober and modest beginnings of what in his own days had evolved into utter ‘madness’ – that is, the lavish and expensive spectacles on a grand scale.
Roman enthusiasm for dance is not confined to the ‘decadence’ associated with the imperial period
But the Romans danced long before these Etruscans arrived in the city. Among the very first rituals allegedly introduced by Numa, the second king of the Romans after the legendary Romulus, was the dance of the Salian priests, whose very name refers to the verb for ‘jumping’ (salire). These priests were held in high esteem, and their skill at dancing did in no way impair their reputation as military men. Their ritual dance opened the war season in the month of March, and the Salians danced carrying their famous bucklers or small shields, the first of which was said to have fallen from the sky. This dance, too, was a way of communicating with the gods and obtaining their approval for human actions. Unlike the theatrical dances criticised by Livy, the ritual dance of the Salians was well respected in Roman society.
However, despite the longstanding presence of such honourable and manly dances at Rome, disparaging views on dance constantly crop up. Take a letter Pliny the Younger wrote to a friend who failed to show up for a dinner party. After scolding him for missing out on a delectable meal, complete with entertainment provided by a lyre-player and comedians, Pliny can hardly believe that his friend would prefer instead a party that featured female dancers ‘from Cadiz’. In another letter, Pliny remembers Ummidia Quadratilla, a wealthy lady who kept a pantomime troupe in her own home, where she lived with her young grandson. To her credit, Pliny writes, she had the good sense to shield her grandson from the dancers and send him instead to his room to study.
As Pliny’s letters illustrate, wealthy and powerful individuals embraced dance as an entertainment, which is demonstrated by the depiction of a sumptuous dinner party featuring young acrobats in Petronius’ Satyricon (rendered famous by Federico Fellini’s film of 1969), or by Suetonius’ portrait of the emperor Nero, who performed as a dancer impersonating mythical characters. But Roman enthusiasm for dance spectacles is not confined to the notorious ‘decadence’ associated with the imperial period (from the first century CE onwards).
In the last decades of the Republic, Cicero attacked his enemies by describing them as dissolute or effeminate dancers, and Tacitus tells us that Maecenas, Horace’s friend and mentor, was infatuated with an Egyptian pantomime dancer named Bathyllus; as a consequence, Augustus, who was friends with Maecenas, admitted this dance genre into the yearly games held in his own honour. Even back in the 2nd century BCE, the heyday of the Republic, conservative Romans noted that the sons of aristocrats took dance lessons, a practice that no one would have remarked on if it did not have some traction.
Since dance is a multifaceted phenomenon, there can be no uniform response to it at any one time (this is as true for ancient Greece as it is for Rome). But, rather than acknowledging the complexity of Roman views on dance, modern readers have long privileged the negative evaluations. The modern bias against Roman dance culture may be one of the reasons why the fascinating account of the origin of dance we find in the 1st-century BCE Epicurean philosopher and poet Lucretius has gone all but unnoticed.
Book Five of Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of the Universe describes the progress of civilisation from the first manifestations of vegetable and animal life to the development of human society. Within this account, the invention of dance stands out as the first innovation that is not a reproduction or imitation of a natural phenomenon. Fire is obtained when thunderbolts hit trees, human language is a more sophisticated version of expressive codes shared by animals, song arises through the imitation of birds, and pipes are built on the model of reeds producing sounds when the wind blows through them. Dance, by contrast, is the first truly cultural practice. This is all the more remarkable as animals were often described as dancing – goats, bears, owls – so it would have been easy for Lucretius to introduce dance as yet another innovation based on the observation of nature. But he chooses to leave behind the pattern he followed up to this point and instead provides dance with an intrinsic motivation:
Music softened their spirits and pleased them along with the repletion of food; for then, all things belong to the heart. So they would often stretch out on the soft grass among themselves near a stream of water under the branches of a high tree. With no great means did they hold their bodies in a pleasant state, especially when the weather was smiling and the seasons of the year painted the green meadows with flowers. Then, jokes, then, conversation, then, laughter used to be sweet; for then, a rustic muse was strong. Then, a joyful exuberance moved them to adorn their heads and shoulders with garlands of plaited flowers and leaves, and to pace unrhythmically while moving their limbs in a rough manner and to beat mother earth with a rough foot, which provoked sweet laughter and chuckling, because all these new and marvellous things were stronger then.
(My own translation)
The passage lays out a precise context that led to the invention of the new practice. The sevenfold repetition of ‘then’, in addition to locating the moment in a remote past, hammers home the fact that no other circumstances could have produced the same effect. What stands out in this glimpse of ancestral rural bliss is the emphasis on sensation. Once the basic bodily needs of food and drink are met – once the senses of taste and smell have been catered to – a variety of further sensations are sought out: the softness of a meadow, the sounds of flowing water, the shadow of a tree, the colours and scent of flowers. Touch, hearing, seeing and perhaps smelling contribute to the physical wellbeing of these ancestors. They share jokes, conversation, laughter and joy, until the emotion moves them to adorn their bodies and try out the first dance steps. We may imagine that their feet beating the earth produce the thumping sounds that the sevenfold tum (Latin for ‘then’) anticipates, so that their dance is both a kinetic and an acoustic response to the sensations they experience. The rough dancing also leads to more ‘sweet’ laughter, nourishing their sensory experience and enhancing it further.
‘There is dance in religious cults because our ancestors did not want any part of the body not to sense religion’
In this account, dance seems to arise from an abundance of agreeable sensations. It is a motor response to a particular type of physical state. But another detail is interesting: how do you dance when you do not master the technique yet? That is, how do you signal that your bodily movement is in fact a dance when there is no agreement yet on what that actually is, no conventions that make dance recognisable as such? You put a garland on your head. The moment of arbitrary invention is marked by this preliminary act of transforming the body, of making it special with the help of an artefact. Dance involves more, after all, than just a moving body. At least at this early stage of human culture, the material object of the garland compensates for the absence of dance skills and conventions.
Lucretius’ dance is a purely human matter: unlike those who explained the proverb of the old man dancing or the arrival of Etruscan dancers in Rome, Lucretius, as an Epicurean philosopher, has no regard for the veneration of the gods. There is no religion involved in his account of the first dance. And yet, the detail of the garlands, abundantly used in Roman cults, connects Lucretius’ prehistoric past to actual religious practices of his time. What is more, Lucretius’ emphasis on sensation strangely resonates with an enigmatic observation on dance and religion we find in the late antique commentator of Vergil named Servius (who, by the way, also transmits the proverb of the old man dancing with which we started).
In the 4th century CE, Servius explains Vergil’s poems by drawing on a rich store of transmitted knowledge about Roman culture and religion. Commenting on a line from the fifth Eclogue, which mentions dances in a ritual context, he writes that ‘obviously the reason why there is dance in religious cults is because our ancestors did not want any part of the body not to sense religion: for song pertains to the spirit, dance to the mobility of the body’ (my own translation). Dance as a means to sense religion in the entire body, through movement: this is Servius’ rationale for its inclusion in religious practices. This apparently straightforward explanation presupposes that, for the Romans, religion was something to be ‘sensed’. The Latin religio is a rich and difficult concept that should not simply be conflated with modern notions of religion. The idea of ‘sensing’ religion emphasises the concrete, corporeal dimension of Roman religious practice. Note that according to Servius, even its ‘spiritual’ dimension is in fact tied to the body, namely through the singing voice. But what interests us here is the body’s ability to generate sensation by moving. It is this ability that is relevant for religio. Servius thus draws a direct line from the physiology of the living body, which is defined by its mobility, to sensation and to religion. Religious practice is closely tied to the physiological conditions of the human being, among which moving and sensing are primordial.
Servius’ sensory religio is thus very different from modern notions of religious feeling as an inner state. Rather, religio is sensed and expressed through the body, through movement and the voice. The focus on sensation approximates it to the primordial dance envisioned by Lucretius, despite the latter’s notorious dismissal of religion. What they share is the idea that dance is both an outlet and a cradle of sensation.
Sensation is not a well-established topic in the study of Roman religion. Roman religious rituals are usually described as centred around the correct execution and observance of ancestral tradition. They do not rely on a certain type of subjective experience, let alone an inner attitude of those involved. Servius’ curious phrase ‘sensing religion’ doesn’t imply that Roman rituals aimed at intensifying sensory experience on the part of practitioners and attendants. But I do think that Servius’ phrase may transport a residual awareness of the remote origins of dance as they are imagined by Lucretius, that is, as a way of channelling an overwhelming abundance of sensations, of giving them a physical form. In other words, even though Lucretius did not intend to comment on Roman religious practices, his account of the origins of dance may still tell us something about the function of ritualised bodily movement, regardless of its context and intentions.
The missing link between Lucretius’ primordial dance and Servius’ dance as a part of Roman religio is the process of repeating, imitating and codifying physical movement, in which spontaneous, disorderly movement is transformed into regular patterns and figures. Over time, these patterns and figures may assume a very different function from Lucretius’ primeval dances: rather than channelling, expressing and nourishing sensation, they may provide forms of motor behaviour in which strong sensations are ultimately contained rather than enhanced.
If Lucretius and other Roman poets such as Tibullus and Propertius establish a connection between strong sensations, dance and ritual, it is important to stress that they all describe either the remote origins of certain practices, or else situate those practices in faraway places, such as Egypt or an idealised countryside. It is in those presumed origins or imaginary distant places that dance is associated with overwhelming sensations, not in the historical reality of ancient Rome. Servius’ phrase seems to hark back to this idea but, for all we know, the reality of Roman religious rituals is quite different. In other words, the phrase ‘sensing religion’ may be more in tune with a particular literary tradition of explaining religious practice than with Roman religious practice itself.
Still, the literary tradition may hold a key to a better understanding of Roman religious practices. If the latter are characterised by the correct observance of ritual form, this seems to be the very opposite of Lucretius’ spontaneous, exuberant dancing, in which the only gesture towards ritualisation is the garland. And yet, the very contrast suggests that uncontrolled physical movement and ritual form are like two sides of the same coin, in that the latter may serve to contain the former.
Both disorderly and choreographed dances are spontaneous or studied expressions of agency
If this is so, it is not surprising that Roman religious rituals don’t emphasise individual sensory experience. But at the same time, we may now understand that the rigid forms of Roman rituals and their faithful execution carry a negative memory, as it were, of what they exclude and differ from, namely spontaneous and disorderly physical movement, and also the sensory experience that would motivate and accompany such movement.
Most importantly, it is interesting to note that both varieties of physical movement that we are looking at, spontaneous and choreographed, have in common that they deviate in some way from ordinary physical movement. This deviation is not necessarily intrinsic to the movement itself; it can also be marked by a material object, such as a garland, or by a specific space, such as a dance floor or the area surrounding an altar. But basically, inasmuch as ‘to dance’ means to move differently, to depart from habitual, everyday patterns, spaces and contexts of movement, it is an expression of freedom and agency. Even when dance figures (or other types of ritual movements) are prescribed and must be faithfully respected, they still denote the choice to adopt these extra-ordinary forms of physical behaviour in the first place.
In a way, then, both disorderly and choreographed dances are spontaneous or studied expressions of agency. And it makes perfect sense that Lucretius presents dance as the first truly cultural practice, a human invention responding to and regulating sensory experience.
We will never know what the old man’s dance of the opening proverb looked like. Are we to imagine a stately dance composed of regular steps or a vigorous performance of virtuosic figures? In truth, it does not matter. What counts in the logic of the story is that he chose not to follow the crowd but stayed behind and continued his dance. He preferred to align his agency with the requirements of the ritual rather than to run and fight. Perhaps this is why the proverb features an old man: according to Roman values, young men were expected to fight the enemy. But the old man is free to resist the impulse and to reject the military ideology that nourishes it. He is free to focus on the task at hand: to perform the physical movements that the dance requires.
