Bibasis

bibasis (maybe)

Καὶ βίβασις δέ τι ἦν εἶδος Λακωνικῆς ὀρχήσεως, ἧς καὶ τὰ ἆθλα προυτίθετο οὐ τοῖς παισὶ μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ ταῖς κόραις· ἔδει δ’ ἅλλεσθαι καὶ ψαύειν τοῖς ποσὶ πρὸς τὰς πυγάς, καὶ ἠριθμεῖτο τὰ πηδήματα, ὅθεν ἐπὶ μιᾶς ἦν ἐπίγραμμα·
χείλιά πόκα βίβαντι, πλεῖστα δὴ τῶν πήποκα.
(Pollux, Onomasticon 4.102)

‘Bibasis’ was a kind of Spartan dance, in which prizes were awarded not only to boys but also to girls; one had to leap and touch the buttocks with one’s feet, and the jumps were counted. Hence the inscription in honour of one of these girls,
‘Who once did a thousand at bibasis, the most ever done’.
(tr. Matthew Dillon & Lynda Garland, adapted by David Bauwens)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: