The cordax was a provocative, licentious, and often obscene mask dance of ancient Greek comedy

Ancient Greek comedy

Ancient Greek comedy was one of the final three principal dramatic forms in the theatre of classical Greece . Athenian comedy is conventionally divided into three periods, Old Comedy, Middle Comedy, and New Comedy...

. In his play the The Clouds

The Clouds

The Clouds is a comedy written by the celebrated playwright Aristophanes lampooning intellectual fashions in classical Athens. It was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and it was not well received, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. It was revised...

, Aristophanes

Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete...

 complains that other playwrights of his time try to hide the feebleness of their plays by bringing an old woman onto the stage to dance the cordax. He notes with pride that his patrons will not find such gimmicks in his plays.

Petronius Arbiter in his Roman

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 the Satyricon

Satyricon

Satyricon is a Latin work of fiction in a mixture of prose and poetry. It is believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius, though the manuscript tradition identifies the author as a certain Titus Petronius...

has Trimalchio boast to his dinner guests that no one dances the cordax better than his wife, Fortunata. The nature of this dance is described in the satires of Juvenal, who says "the girls encouraged by applause sink to the ground with tremulous buttocks." The poet Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

 and playwright Plautus

Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus...

 refer to the same dance as iconici motus.

Modern philologists

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

maintain that the cordax later became the fandango

Fandango

Fandango is a lively couple's dance, usually in triple metre, traditionally accompanied by guitars and castanets or hand-clapping . Fandango can both be sung and danced. Sung fandango is usually bipartite: it has an instrumental introduction followed by "variaciones"...

. Juvenal makes specific mention of the testarum crepitus (clicking of castanets). In the earlier Greek form, finger cymbals were used.