Chapter Three focuses on Euripides’ Ion, wherein we find important depictions of both male and female solo dancing. I begin this chapter with a discussion of male dancing in late Archaic and Classical Greek thought, exploring how male choral leadership, especially as embodied by the god Apollo and the hero Theseus, offers a positive model for the male dancer as an authoritative but collaborative figure within his community. I then observe how Ion’s opening monody vacillates between images of male choral leadership and less lofty images of solo work song/dance, calling attention to the ambivalence of the titular character’s social status. I further demonstrate that a similar ambivalence surrounds Ion’s mother Creusa, who performs a monody of her own that draws upon the imagery of female chorality and choral leadership. Yet while Ion’s monody prefigures his transformation from Delphic servant to Athenian royalty, Creusa’s song reframes the assault that resulted in Ion’s birth as a more normative form of maidenly transition. In both cases, I suggest, Euripides uses dance to situate Ion and Creusa within their final roles while also highlighting the contradictions and conflicts that swirl around them.

The Conclusion draws connections between the Archaic and Classical discourse outlined in this book and the representation of dance, especially pantomime, in the Roman Imperial period. It focuses on a set of key passages in Lucian’s treatise On the Dance, suggesting that by reading dance with Lucian, we can further refine our perspective on the complex interplay between literature, culture, and the potential of the dancing body. I choose to conclude with Lucian in part because his character Lycinus offers an illuminating model for the creative, subversive, and provocative reading of dance. I show that Lycinus uses familiar forms in new ways and rescripts stories about dance encoded within earlier literature, yet in doing so, he also continues a tradition of using the description of solo dance to foreground generic exploration and experimentation – of bringing the unruly body into contact with the workings of a literary text. Reading dance with Lucian and Lycinus thus reveals how the collision of dance and literature bears fruit across diverse creative and cultural contexts.

Chapter Five brings tragedy and comedy together to explore the links between female solo dance and madness in Euripides and Aristophanes. I begin by considering two instances of female dance that are described – but not performed – on the Athenian stage: Agave’s movement surrounding the murder of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae and the dance of Demostratus’ wife in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. I argue that the projection of these dances outside the theatrical space itself exposes anxieties about the unruliness of female bodies engaged in ritual performance – especially the singular dancer separated from the chorus. I conclude with a contrasting example, exploring how Cassandra’s performance in Euripides’ Trojan Women brings mad female dancing onstage, and, like Io’s dance in Prometheus Bound (Ch. 2), tests the bounds of tragic theatricality.

Chapter Six focuses on the figure of the orchēstris (sympotic female dancer) in the Greek cultural and literary imagination. Since these women have received little attention as a distinct category of performer, I begin by surveying both visual and textual evidence to build up an understanding of how orchēstrides were eroticized, objectified, and largely silenced by extant Greek sources. I then argue that both Xenophon’s Symposium and Theopompus’ On the Funds Plundered from Delphi use the figure of the orchēstris to address questions about gender, social order, agency, and authority. I show that these two strikingly different texts (philosophical and historical) both hint at the unsettling power of the attractive yet unruly female dancer.