Rome: entre passion et condamnation
Résumé
According to a common belief, the Romans supposedly showed little interest in dance. The alleged inclination of the latter towards crudeness and indecency, stemming from the loss of the religious significance of orchestral practices, would have been incompatible with the gravity of Roman morals. The article demonstrates that this idea does not correspond to any historical reality. Our understanding of Roman orchestral practices is distorted by the scarcity of philosophical and technical sources (in contrast to the abundance of documentation on Greece) and the lack of objectivity in many ancient testimonies. The only treatise on dance in Rome, written in Greek at the end of the 1st century BCE by the dancer Pylades, an artist from the East, has disappeared; its existence is known only through a later testimony. The majority of textual sources come from an aristocratic elite and reflect this perspective: philosophers and moralists like Seneca (Letter 47), historians like Suetonius and Tacitus, and theorists of oratory like Quintilian, openly display intellectual disdain for practices deemed popular and incompatible with the serious activities of a citizen. Additionally, there are biased testimonies from Christian authors such as Tertullian (On the Spectacles), Cyprian (Letter 2 to Eucratius), or Augustine (City of God 2), whose vehement condemnation of actors and performances includes that of dance (saltatio) and dancers.