I

How to inculcate virtue in the citizens of Magnesia by means of the dance component of choreia constitutes one of the principal concerns in the Laws (= Leg.), revealing Plato's evolving ideas about the expediency of music and paideia for the construction of his ideal city since the Republic.Footnote ¹ Indeed, a steady stream of monographs and articles on the Laws has enriched our understanding of how Plato theorizes the body as a site of intervention and choral dance as instrumental in solidifying social relations and in conditioning the ethical and political self.Footnote ² As one scholar has aptly put it: ‘a city and its sociopolitical character [are] effectively danced into existence.’Footnote ³ Drawing on this recent work, I focus on an enigmatic passage in Laws Book 7 that merits more attention than it has received, in which Plato curiously singles out Bacchic dances from those that are ‘without controversy’ (815b7–d4):Footnote ⁴

How can we explain Plato's elliptical treatment of Bacchic dance without resorting to reductive stereotypes about Dionysus? Does the expression οὐ πολιτικόν simply designate apolitical—that is, irrelevant or extraneous to the things and discourses of the polis—or does it bear the stronger connotation of anti-political? Respected authorities have proposed various such solutions, but no consensus has been reached, nor have compelling arguments been advanced to elucidate how Plato conceptualizes Bacchic dances vis-à-vis the larger matrix of Magnesia's variegated choral dances.Footnote ⁵

Glenn Morrow has suggested that, on the basis of the absence of maenads in the divine coterie in this passage, Plato's rejection of Bacchic performance is directed exclusively at satyr dance and not at the ritual dances of Dionysiac cult in which the maenads traditionally enjoyed a principal part. This explanation has an air of plausibility but strikes me as an argumentum ex silentio that also underestimates the profound ritual dimension of the figures that are enumerated in the passage.Footnote ⁶ In the course of my argument, I refrain from inferring satyr-drama as Plato's principal target in this passage for several reasons.Footnote ⁷ First, the Athenian's statements on bakcheia occur amid a discussion about religious choral performances, independently of his statements that follow on the major dramatic art forms that competed for prizes at the prestigious City Dionysia and Lenaea in Athens.Footnote ⁸ Second, by the end of Plato's life, the prominence and perhaps popular appeal of satyr drama had diminished in Athenian performance culture, reduced by the mid fourth century to one satyr-play that served as a sort of prelude to the tragic agôn.Footnote ⁹ Finally, the sole purported allusion to satyr-play in the entire Platonic corpus has recently been subject to scholarly doubt.Footnote ¹⁰ It seems unlikely, then, that Plato was particularly concerned with satyr-play per se than with a more general Bacchic or Dionysiac ethos to which a range of Dionysian processions, dithyrambic cult-songs, satyr-ritual and satyric performances of various musical and cultic modes belonged. I adopt therefore a more capacious understanding of the Bacchic in my present consideration of Plato's calculated approach to bakcheia.

My argument unfolds in two steps. First, I review the ways in which Plato envisions the mimetic and socializing force of choral dance to cultivate the habitus of Magnesia's citizens and to configure choreut-citizens into hierarchically tiered groups. This preliminary sketch should be uncontroversial but will furnish us with the context to ascertain the sui generis nature of Bacchic performances and Plato's circumspect handling of them. In order to grapple with the theoretical challenges of Dionysus, I contend, Plato devises an intriguing aetiology and teleological narrative of dance that relegates the god to a pre-political, pre-rational moment of the polis. More specifically, by restricting the god and his dances to individuals that are either non-rational (infants) or non-kinetic (elders), Plato forestalls the potentially disruptive effects of Bacchic dance. This reading illuminates, moreover, how Plato, in the teeth of his critique of bakcheia, can warrant retaining a Dionysiac chorus of elders in the Cretan colony. Uncovering the strategy by which Plato dismisses Bacchic dancing without eliminating Dionysus from Magnesia entirely illustrates how Plato delicately negotiates his political fantasies with the historical realities of Greek civic religion.

II

Plato had already correlated dance to ethics in the Republic, asserting there that ‘rhythm and harmony permeate the inner part of the soul more than anything else, affecting it most strongly and bringing it grace’.Footnote ¹¹ In Socrates’ account, proper musical training promulgates civic values and encourages citizens to reject the immoral and to pursue the noble (401e–402a).Footnote ¹² Mousikê enjoys even greater prominence in the Laws, where the most lengthy and revealing discussions cluster around the Athenian's classification of civic choral practices in Books 2 and 7.

Plato arranges choral dances of the Cretan colony according to gender, age, political status and natural dispositions. For instance, the children in Magnesia are separated by sex at the age of six, whereupon state-funded guardians of their respective genders instruct them in dance. The Athenian recapitulates this imbrication of the cultural and the biological when he proposes that, after ‘drawing a division (διορίζω, 802e1)’ between males and females, each dance unit will be prescribed music of a certain rhythm, harmony, metre and theme congenial to ‘the natural (τῆς φύσεως) difference of the sexes’ (802e7), so that dancers ‘spend their lives according to the habit of their nature’ (κατὰ τὸν τρόπον τῆς φύσεως διαβιώσονται, 804b2–3).Footnote ¹³ Plato then distinguishes music that accompanies masculine dance, which radiates with ‘magnificence (μεγαλοπρεπές) and that which inclines toward courage (τὴν ἀνδρίαν)’, from ‘the sort that is disposed more toward decorum (πρὸς τὸ κόσμιον) and moderation (σῶφρον), which is to be regarded rather as like the character of womankind (θηλυγενής, 802e8–11)’.Footnote ¹⁴ Plato provides, in effect, guidelines for a moral system which are grounded in a kinesthetic continuum ranging from energetic to passive, and which foreground presumed natural gender differences (τὰ μὲν τῆς φύσεως ὀρθά, 655d–e). The choral experience is profoundly multisensory: the tactile sensation of dance and the pleasurable observation of harmonized movement accompanied by acoustics of appropriate speed and metre mutually reinforce and collectively shape an individual's social self-understanding.

Elsewhere, age is the operative index in prescribing song and dance.Footnote ¹⁵ In a well-known section in the Laws, the Athenian divides the citizenry into three age-based choruses over which three patron deities preside, whom Plato notably hails as ‘co-feasters and consociates in the dance (συγχορευτάς)’ (665a4).Footnote ¹⁶ These gods determine the disposition and demeanour of their respective choreia, guaranteeing the mimetic bedrock of dance in Magnesia (μιμήματα τρόπων ἐστὶ τὰ περὶ τὰς χορείας, 665d; also 796c).Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, the Muses oversee the children, while citizens up to the age of thirty celebrate and dance to Apollo Paian. The final chorus belonging to Dionysus consists of those between thirty and sixty years, who, along with the Nocturnal Council, are instructed to supervise the city's choral dances to ensure that they are executed scrupulously.Footnote ¹⁸ Choreia operates along a regulated and uninterrupted temporal sequencing of civic dances predicated on biological principles designed to promote proper attitudes about the way in which one relates corporeally to the social world at different moments of one's life.Footnote ¹⁹

The following passage, however, puts into deep relief the normative entailments of Plato's classification of dance (814e2–815a2):

The Athenian's classification opposes the movements of beautiful and wretched bodies, and further subdivides the former category into the pyrrhic dance and the pacific dance. The postures and gestures of the latter (emmeleiai)—some accompanying sacrificial hymns, and others paired with praises to the gods (815de)—are conducted ‘in the manner that befits law-abiding men (εὐνόμων ἀνδρῶν, 815b)’.Footnote ²⁰ Pyrrhic dance, performed in innumerable worship contexts to myriad Greek deities, emphasizes ‘noble (ἀγαθός) bodies and souls in which the limbs of the body are extended in a straight line (ὀρθός, 815b)’.Footnote ²¹ The moral overtones of dance in the Laws keys into long-standing Greek discourses about the value-laden body—witness Hesiod's identification of justice with straightness, and of injustice with deviation, zigzag and curves (Op. 248–64), and the Theognidea (535–6), which describes the head of slavish types (δουλείη κεφαλή) as not standing upright (ἰθεῖα) but resting crooked (σκολιή) on a sloping neck.Footnote ²²

Contrary to expectations, Plato does not purge potentially disruptive dances like comedy (τὰ κωμῳδήματα) from Magnesia. For just as citizens derive benefit from watching commendable dances, so the attention to disreputable dances leads citizens to recognize and reject immoral behaviour.Footnote ²³ It is particularly striking that, while Plato assigns noble dances to Magnesia's citizens, he allocates trivial dances as negative exempla to the already socially abject (816e3–10):

The raison d’être of slaves and foreigners in the context of dance, then, is to train spectator-citizens to learn the serious (τὰ σπουδαῖα) and repudiate the ignoble (γελοῖα, 816d9). The exclusion of non-citizens from proper choreia, and thus from civic sacrifices, bars them from a socio-religious economy in which innumerable symbolic and material commodities circulated.

Such passages yield a fairly clear picture of the political ramifications of the Athenian's proposed dance program. Inspired by the Egyptians’ penchant for maintaining their traditional dances and songs and for legislating against innovation (Leg. 656d5–e4), the Athenian counsels Magnesia's lawmakers (νομοθέται) and law guardians (νομοφύλακες) to preserve their own choral program in perpetuity.Footnote ²⁴ Given that dance upholds ancestral laws and customs (799b), to introduce novelties to the established repertoire of music and dance, as Plato attests elsewhere, would be to corrupt ‘the most fundamental political and social conventions’.Footnote ²⁵

III

It is by now easy to recognize how the schematic and mimetic nature of Magnesian choreia is predicated on Plato's overarching ethics. The specifically choral dimension of Magnesia's dances accentuates these mimetic and emotive effects, in so far as one's fellow choreuts reflect one's own character in the making through collective song and dance. The discussion at Leg. 898a, which builds on arguments from the Timaeus (for example 33b, 34a and 40c), equates regularity and orderly motions with reason, and many critics have noted that for Plato the harmonized execution of choral dances—reminiscent of the fixed circular motions of the celestial bodies—can resolve irrational impulses.Footnote ²⁶ In sum, Plato conceives of proper choreia as a socially constitutive and morally enriching repertory of songs and dances of appropriate rhythm and melody that are assimilated mimetically to the divine.

With these preliminary ideas in mind, let us return to the passage in which Plato qualifies Bacchic dance, along with cognate dances involving Nymphs, Pans, Sileni and Satyrs, as οὐ πολιτικόν (815b7–d4).Footnote ²⁷ We can posit some hypotheses about the nature of Dionysiac dances in both ritual and satyr drama despite the scant and distorted nature of the ancient testimony: first, Bacchic dances (as Plato imagines them) appear to prioritize the individual over the collective and are thus antithetical to the unifying aim of Magnesian choreia. Here, we might adhere to Angelo Brelich's heuristic distinction between primary rituals that assist membership into a political community and secondary rituals that secure private salvation in the afterlife (for instance the katharmoi and teletai mentioned at Leg. 815c–d).Footnote ²⁸

Further, Bernd Seidensticker has identified from descriptions in tragedy and satyr plays, as well as from iconographic conventions on pottery, such as the famous Pronomos Vase, the stylistic features of satyr dance such as the sikinnis: rapid successions of excessive leaping, vigorous motions, and agitated kicking, but also crawling motions and ‘pantomime of fear and flight’.Footnote ²⁹ Seidensticker contends, moreover, that, although we can occasionally glimpse patterned choreography of satyr choruses on vases, satyr choreuts are more typically depicted in disarray with individual members running alone or acting in smaller units.Footnote ³⁰

Additional factors surely motivated Plato's circumspect attitude toward Dionysus, all of which have been well documented and studied. As several authorities have observed, literary sources and visual images routinely represent Dionysus and his ambiguously gendered consociates, often dwelling in the woodland, as epitomizing hybridity and blurring the line between human and god, human and animal, and male and female.Footnote ³¹ E.R. Dodds argued long ago that Dionysiac cult admitted such marginal figures as slaves and freedmen, not only accepting but even promoting role reversals; this is consistent with the regular dramatic portrayal of satyr choreuts as boisterous, dispersed in their choral formation, and in open rebellion against existing hierarchies (cf. Aesch. Theoroi or Isthmiastai, in which the satyrs disobey Dionysus in their intention to become athletes).Footnote ³² In short, the exceptionality of Dionysus and his cult in the Greek imaginary, and the caricatured ways in which dramatists and artists alike sketched the rather aggressive dances of those personages in the god's entourage, must have been familiar to Plato; these prevailing conceptions of Dionysus surely amplified the Athenian's anxieties about Bacchic dances, which ‘cannot easily be marked off either as pacific or as warlike, nor as of any one particular kind’ (815c5–7).

These commonplace connotations of the god, however, do not take us very far in accounting for Plato's peculiar antipathy to Bacchic dance, which discloses something far more intriguing about the way in which he confronts complex theoretical challenges in his political-philosophical enterprise. I now turn to a crucial passage found earlier in Laws Book 7 that clarifies how Plato strategically embeds the Bacchic impulse in an imaginary chronology of progressive musical-cultural stages that is mapped onto the biological stages of the individual human. The Athenian draws a curious analogy between the convulsions of infants and the movements of frenzied Bacchants, focussing on the way in which soothing music and lulling motion exert curative effects on both overstimulated groups (790d5–e4):Footnote ³³

Central to Plato's theorization of infants and Bacchic revellers is an analogous pair of musical terms. Where the remedy for unruly children calls for motion (κίνησιν) and harmony (μελῳδίαν), Bacchantes require the application of dance (χορείᾳ) and music (μούσῃ)—that is, both constituencies rely on remedies that combine corporeal and acoustic elements, the fundamental components of Greek mousikê. The Athenian unpacks the comparison (790e8–791b1):

According to this remarkable passage, the application of external motion (σεισμόν) and music restores both manic Bacchants and restless infants to psychological and physiological soundness. This idea resonates with discussions about disease at Ti. 88d–e and 89a7, in which Plato recommends constant vibrations (σεισμούς) and the oscillating movement produced by boats (τῶν αἰωρήσεων κατά τε τοὺς πλοῦς) to subjugate the disruptive energy in the distressed individual.Footnote ³⁴ As we can see, Plato here reiterates the image of sailing (οἷον πλέοντας, 790d1) to describe the union of song and movement to induce the infant to sleep. In a similar vein, the pacifying effects of Bacchic dance, administered by Dionysus’ priestesses, convert the worshippers’ madness into sobriety, transforming haphazard gestures into movements attuned to the aulos. I will return momentarily to further implications of Plato's comparison of children to Bacchantes.

The salutary effects of Dionysus notwithstanding, Plato makes clear that Bacchic dance remains unsystematic and does not contribute to the cultivation of the rational faculty. According to the Athenian, unrestrained and violent motions, and the inability to keep still, reflect a cowardly (δειλός) and intemperate disposition (ἀγύμναστος … πρὸς τὸ σωφρονεῖν, 816a). Whereas pyrrhic and peaceful dances, and the radiant choruses governed by the Muses and Apollo, articulate the character and moral qualities of their respective deities, Plato emphasizes in the above-cited passage that Bacchantes worship with sacrifice whichever gods each one so desires (μετὰ θεῶν, οἷς ἂν καλλιεροῦντες ἕκαστοι θύωσι, 791a9), clashing with Magnesia's well-coordinated and mimetic musical regime.Footnote ³⁵ Let it be stressed again that Plato conceptualizes choreia as the ‘emulation of characters’ (μιμήματα τρόπων, 655d5) intended to facilitate sentiments of affinity among dancers through shared kinesthetic experiences. Bacchic dance, which cannot be identified by a narrow set of generic rules or be tied to a distinct recipient deity, threatens to undo the normative underpinnings of ideal choreia. And as opposed to kindred dubious art forms such as comedy, lament and mime, which presuppose identifiable aesthetic and moral criteria, Bacchic dance, devoid of a patterned choreography, resists being exploited as a negative exemplum. Plato, philosopher-cum-legislator, recognizes that the indeterminate and scattered nature of bakcheia challenges his theorization of dance and Magnesia's social order; it is at once a conceptual anomaly to be resolved in philosophical argumentation and a source of political irritation to be harnessed through proper legislation.

It needs to be underlined, moreover, that, in opposition to those dances that do meet Plato's approval, which construct civic identity and assist in the acquisition of reason, the remedial effects of Bacchic dance to subdue mania is neither self-directed nor permanent but intermittent, transient and derived from without (as the image of the rocking of distressed infants demonstrates). Whereas the rational dances of Magnesia encourage citizens to internalize the integration of joy in song and dance with a refined moral disposition, Bacchic dance is envisaged as fundamentally pre-rational and unconcerned with instilling permanent ethical qualities.Footnote ³⁶ In order to control the Bacchic element in Magnesia, Plato devises, I argue in what follows, an elaborate narrative about the origin and evolution of dance that relegates Dionysus to a pre-political order preceding (and inconsistent with) the synchronized musical regime of the Muses and Apollo.

IV

A potential key to our initial explanandum resides in a set of informative passages in Book 2 that centre on the aetiology of dance. There, the Athenian discusses the inborn tendency of young creatures to gesticulate and to exclaim in agitation (653d7–e3):

The Athenian portrays infants as delighting in confused shouting and movement, as if they possess a nascent tendency to sing and dance. This notion of an inherent human desire for mousikê is echoed in another suggestive passage in which, while speculating on the origins (ἀρχάς) of music and gymnastics, the Athenian compares the unpredictable movements of infants to Bacchic rites. It is here, in fact, that Plato's imaginary chronology of man and his tendentious history of song-and-dance culture emerge most patently (672b3–c6):

The Athenian elicits a multifaceted aetiological legend about Bacchic rites, wine, and music and gymnastics, tracing these Dionysiac inventions to the remote mythological past.Footnote ³⁷ Most pertinent to my enquiry is Plato's report that Dionysus instituted ‘Bacchic rites and all the frenzied choreia (τάς τε βακχείας καὶ πᾶσαν τὴν μανικὴν … χορείαν)’ as a consequence of the madness inflicted upon him by Hera. Instead of elaborating or speculating on the veracity of this account, Plato swiftly departs from the realm of myth to return to the cradle argument that analogizes aspects of Bacchic rites to the disjointed movements of newborns who lack ‘reason, or that amount of reason, which properly belongs to it when fully developed’. Despite the distinct evidentiary forms and epistemic registers constituting these two explanations, both attribute the origin of dance to madness and irrationality: while the mythological aetiology of choreia focusses on Dionysus’ momentary loss of γνώμη, the Athenian's preferred explanation ascribes the foundation of dance to the irrational movements of fledgling creatures bereft of φρόνησις.Footnote ³⁸ What the Athenian's comparison of Dionysus and infants thematizes is precisely the musical-cultural stage preceding the establishment of the three citizen-choruses articulated in Book 2—that is, before the children of Magnesia join the chorus of Muses. For Plato, the pre-political Dionysiac moment represents an inchoate stage of dance that ultimately generates ideal choreia with its distinctions of gender, age, character-type and social status.

The legislator's objective, therefore, is to harness the innate desire to dance, and to sharpen the citizens’ aesthetic and moral perceptions through a well-designed programme of civic choreia. These choric practices will, in the service of the polis, foster the rational faculty and guide citizens toward virtue (653bc). Accordingly, the careful application of rhythm and harmony in the musical education of children, who are by nature uncalculated in their babbling and leaping about, is a propaedeutic to the acquisition of logos. Dionysus is, in other words, a culture-hero and the inventor of dance, whose contributions are, however, emphatically associated with the non-schematic and mimetically flawed movements of those who are undergoing a pre-rational life stage; Bacchic dance is untethered to virtue and lacks the integrative force of civic choreia.

It may be significant, then, that the Athenian poses a rhetorical question (to which Clinias assents) that ascribes the actual training of rational pleasure to the Muses and Apollo alone, leaving Dionysus unmentioned: θῶμεν παιδείαν εἶναι πρώτην διὰ Μουσῶν τε καὶ Ἀπόλλωνος, ἢ πῶς; (‘Shall we postulate that education owes its origin to the Muses and Apollo?’, 654a).Footnote ³⁹ In light of the foregoing analysis, the conspicuous absence of Dionysus as a tutelary deity of education in the Athenian's terse formulation is no accidental omission; it conforms to Plato's view that the systematized, pedagogical component of dance (namely that which assists in the transition from child to adult, savage to civic, and nature to culture) lies in the orbit of the Muses and Apollo.Footnote ⁴⁰ In other words, the Laws acknowledges Dionysus but unequivocally demarcates the Dionysiac substratum of dance from the subsequent performance curriculum of Apollo and the Muses which educates the souls of its citizens and integrates the city-state's various age-classes.Footnote ⁴¹ By recognizing Dionysus’ primordial contributions to dance, Plato redeems his standing in Magnesia, while simultaneously subordinating his political importance to the other choral deities.

In Nietzschean terms, the Dionysus-Apollo binarism is a largely synchronic dialectic between antithetical cultural drives that beget the creative impulse of the ‘metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will’. Plato by contrast construes a teleology of dance in which Dionysus precedes the perfectly ordered choral songs and dances of Apollo and the Muses, the veritable backbone of civic paideia. The Dionysiac within this narrative constitutes the incipient stage of Greek dance that anticipates the more decorous, rational and socially formative choruses of Magnesia. These latter dances are coterminous with the emergence of a fully fledged political order, as both purport to forge and reproduce eunomia within a stratified politics.Footnote ⁴² In Plato's fictive chronology of dance, bakcheia is οὐ πολιτικόν to the degree that it does not contribute to the values and political exigencies of Plato's ideal city at its fruition.Footnote ⁴³

Plato's measured critique of Bacchic dances in fact reveals a significant point of tension in his political thought-experiment. Given the integral role of Dionysus in actual epichoric and Panhellenic cult and myth, the god must be accounted for in the second-best city; we should not forget that Crete, the setting of the dialogue, is where the myth tradition locates Dionysus’ abduction of Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, and where the Curetes and the Nymphs Adrasteia and Ida reportedly nurtured the infant Zeus.Footnote ⁴⁴ Consequently, the Athenian Stranger is prudent to set aside Bacchic dances—‘letting them be’ (ἐάσαντας κεῖσθαι, 815d)—rather than banish them wholesale, nor does he ever explicitly reject Dionysus the god.Footnote ⁴⁵ Perhaps for this reason, too, Leg. 672a5–b1 flatters Dionysus by enumerating his timai and gifts to man, nuancing, for instance, the commonplace image of wine as encouraging obscenity and unruly comportment; strictly forbidden in the Republic, the drink is welcome in Magnesia as medicine (φάρμακον, 666b8) and when consumed in moderation.Footnote ⁴⁶ And yet, Dionysus’ presence in the city is an undesirable reminder of an alternative ideology that defies the political aims of Magnesia. Plato takes special measures, then, to minimize the potentially disruptive effects of Bacchic dances by branding them as pre-rational and inconsonant with the immediate concerns of political life.

In closing this article, I should like to address how, in spite of these reservations about Bacchic dance, the Athenian can theoretically justify his inclusion of a chorus of elders placed under the direction of Dionysus. Indeed, Plato is acutely aware of this incongruence, for the Athenian's very invocation of a Dionysiac chorus of elders startles his interlocutor Clinias, who finds such a proposition ‘extremely strange’ (μάλα ἄτοπος, 665b2). To resolve this apparent paradox, the Athenian points out that the chorus of old men struggle to dance and are more disposed to singing as a result of the temperament of their souls, their hardened bones, and their embarrassment to dance publicly (657d1–7; 666bc). Plato claims, furthermore, that those over forty consume wine to alleviate their stage fright, ‘making [them] able and willing to say and to do everything with upmost freedom’ (ἐλευθερία, 649b).

Beyond this, we are told that old men can only take pleasure in dancing second-hand by admiring (θεωροῦντες) the dances of their juniors who arouse in them dormant emotions and memories; as they observe, the elders yearn (ποθοῦντες) for what is absent, recalling with a sense of gloom (δυσθυμία) their former ability to dance nimbly (657d1–8):

Plato's strategy, it seems, is to quarantine Dionysus’ ambit to the cantankerous, wine-imbibing, non-kinetic and thus non-disruptive constituency of the citizenry. The old men of the Dionysiac chorus, former dancers now deficient in their kinetic abilities, are predominantly spectators confined to watching the effortless and rational choral performances of younger men.Footnote ⁴⁷

Thus, infants and old men—both of whom the Laws repeatedly affiliates with Dionysus—are imperfect dancers in sharp contrast to the adults who conjoin corporeal suppleness with reason. The point emerges all the more clearly when the Athenian categorically pairs the two subgroups in his meditation on the appropriate punishment for unintended crimes committed in Magnesia. He attributes wrongdoings carried out in ignorance to the faulty nature of children and elderly: παίδειά τε ἁμαρτήματα καὶ πρεσβυτέρων γιγνόμενα (863d1–2). And as if to underscore the cognitive resemblances of elders and children, the Athenian condescendingly calls old age a ‘second childhood’ (ὁ γέρων δὶς παῖς γίγνοιτ’ ἄν, 646a4). Finally, I argued that the Laws emphasizes the dependence that both newborns and elders have on an external source to maintain a balanced psychological state: just as a rocking motion from without quells restless infants, so too the Dionysian chorus resorts to wine to overcome performance anxiety. The deliberate and recurrent intertwining of these two demographics betrays Plato's underlying anthropology apropos of the institution of dance: whereas infants, excessively loose-limbed, are bereft of reason and thus tend to babble and move about energetically, old men (though fully rational) have lost their ability to perform; both segments, each with its own deficiency, constitute compromised choral dancers.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Laws is concerned with constructing the politics for a stable social order as well as the mechanisms by which to forestall variability and novelty in Magnesia's institutions. Magnesia's choral dances, premised on perceived social, physiological and political distinctions, play a cardinal role in actualizing these politics designed to instil virtue and obedience in its citizens. Plato is keenly aware that the body, actualized through dance, can mediate politēs and polis and sustain the shared self-image of the citizenry. The dances of Bacchus and his retinue contravene the aims of this pedagogical system, which explains why Plato goes to great lengths to restrain their presence in the city-state. To be sure, Plato appreciates the centrality of Dionysus and his cult in the Athenian mythic imagination; yet, he juxtaposes the unstructured, non-schematic and therefore pre-political dances of Bacchus with the politically constitutive dances of the Muses and Apollo. Plato buttresses his argument by associating Dionysus with non-rational newborns and non-kinetic old men. The politically expedient dances of Magnesia are the province of the finely choreographed Apolline choreuts in whom sound mind and sound body coincide, and who thereby perfectly emblematize the Athenian's dictum that ‘the well-educated person will be able both to sing and to dance well’ (ὁ καλῶς ἄρα πεπαιδευμένος ᾄδειν τε καὶ ὀρχεῖσθαι δυνατὸς ἂν εἴη καλῶς, 654b).Footnote ⁴⁹