Title: Why should i dance for Athena? Pyrrhic dance and the choral world of Plato's "Laws"
Description: This dissertation examines the formative role of dance and movement in the Laws, Plato's last work. In the dialogue three elderly gentlemen from Crete, Sparta and Athens meet on a pilgrimage to a sanctuary of Zeus on Crete. To pass the time they contemplate the sort of institutions a lawgiver should establish to create a city whose citizens live virtuously, happily, and in peace with one another. Since the laws of music and the laws of the state are so intimately connected, the institution central to the pilgrims' fictional city is choreia, singing and dancing. In this city, called Magnesia, choral activity is continuous and inclusive: all citizens---children, men, and women---constantly engage in the serious play of singing and dancing for the gods. This dissertation will argue that the prominence of dance in Magnesia is contingent upon Plato's theory of movement as an ethical force: the motions of the body determine the motions of the soul, and vice versa.^

Consequently, dance becomes the lawgiver's primary tool for training as many citizens as possible in the physical and psychic motions that can lead to virtue. Yet since dance alone cannot create full virtue, Plato envisions a state in which the entire citizenry moves with measure and rhythm, encouraged by the city's design. Integrating ritual song and dance, politics, and city design, Plato effects a unified motional endeavor whose model is the circular and constant motion of the universe and the divine. I begin and end with the pyrrhic weapon dance, the only dance in the Laws which Plato fully develops. This is intentional; we are meant to notice his pyrrhic, which is set in ideological contrast to its historical Athenian counterpart.^

Plato's pyrrhic, as a corrective to Athenian choral and religious practices and a paradigm for ethically sound chorality, permits us entry into Magnesia's choral landscape, Plato's choral psychology, his theories of motion, godlikeness, and civic virtue, as well as his final formulations on how the non-philosopher might become as virtuous as possible.
Subjects: Dance, Philosophy, Classical Studies