In both these kinds of dances, the dance that commemorates by
_re_-presenting and the dance that anticipates by _pre_-presenting,
Plato would have seen the element of imitation, what the Greeks called
_mimesis_, which we saw he believed to be the very source and essence of
all art. In a sense he would have been right. The commemorative dance
does especially _re_-present; it reproduces the past hunt or battle; but
if we analyse a little more closely we see it is not for the sake of
copying the actual battle itself, but for the _emotion felt about the
battle_. This they desire to re-live. The emotional element is seen
still more clearly in the dance _fore_-done for magical purposes.
Success in war or in the hunt is keenly, intensely desired. The hunt or
the battle cannot take place at the moment, so the cycle cannot complete
itself. The desire cannot find utterance in the actual act; it grows and
accumulates by inhibition, till at last the exasperated nerves and
muscles can bear it no longer; it breaks out into mimetic anticipatory
action. But, and this is the important point, the action is mimetic, not
of what you see done by another; but of what you desire to do yourself.
The habit of this _mimesis_ of the thing desired, is set up, and ritual
begins. Ritual, then, does imitate, but for an emotional, not an
altogether practical, end.

Plato never saw a savage war-dance or a hunt-dance or a rain-dance, and
it is not likely that, if he had seen one, he would have allowed it to
be art at all. But he must often have seen a class of performances very
similar, to which unquestionably he would give the name of art. He must
have seen plays like those of Aristophanes, with the chorus dressed up
as Birds or Clouds or Frogs or Wasps, and he might undoubtedly have
claimed such plays as evidence of the rightness of his definition. Here
were men _imitating_ birds and beasts, dressed in their skins and