Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/225



A lascivious dance of the old Greek comedy. Any person who performed this dance except upon the stage was considered drunk or dissolute. That the dance underwent changes for the worse is manifest from the representation of it found on a marble tazza in the Vatican (Visconti, Mus. Pio-Clem. iv, 29), where it is performed by ten figures, five Fauns and five Bacchanals, but their movements, though extremely lively and energetic, are not marked by any particular indelicacy. Many ancient authors and scholiasts have commented upon the looseness and sex appeal of this dance. Meursius, Orchest., article Kordax, has collected the majority of passages in the classical writers, bearing upon this subject, but from this disorderly collection it is impossible to arrive at any definite description of the cordax. The article in Cœlius Rhodiginus, Var. Lect. lib. iv, is conventional. The cordax was probably not unlike the French “chahut,” danced in the wayside inns, and it has been preserved in the Spanish “bolero” and the Neapolitan “tarantelia.” When the Romans adopted the Greek customs, they did not neglect the dances Rh