spectators grew pleased with such an exercise of their understanding. Steps, motions, attitudes, figures, positions, now were substituted to speech; and there resulted from them an expression so natural, images so resembling, a pathos so moving, or a pleasantry so agreeable, that people imagined they heard the actions they saw. The gestures alone supplied the place of the sweetness of the voice, of the energy of speech, and of the charms of poetry.[* ]
This kind of entertainment, so new, though formed upon a ground-work already known, planned and executed by genius, and adopted with a passionate fondness by the Romans, was called the Italic dance; and in the transports of pleasures it caused them, they gave to the actors of it, the title of Pantomimes. This was no more than a lively, and not at all exagerated expression, of the truth of their action, which was one continual picture to the eyes of the spectators. Their motion, their feet, their hands, their arms, were but so many different parts of the picture; none of them were to remain idle; but all, with propriety, were to concur to the formation of that assemblage, from which result the harmony, and, with pardon for the expression, the happy all-together of the composition and performance. A dancer learned from his
very name of pantomime, that he could be in no esteem in Rome, but so far as he should be all the actor.
And, in fact, this art was carried to a point of perfection hard to believe; but for such a number of concurrent and authentic testimonies.
It appears also clearly from history, that this art, in its origin, (so favored by an arbitrary prince, and who also made some use of it, towards establishing his despotism, nay even primordially introduced by Bathillus, a slave) could no longer preserve its great excellence, than the spirit of liberty was not wholly worn out in the Roman breasts; and, like its other sister arts, gradually decayed and sunk under the subsequent emperors.
Pilades gave a memorable instance of the (as yet) unextinguished spirit of liberty, when, upon his being banished Rome, for some time, by Augustus Cesar, upon account of the disturbances the pantomime parties occasioned, he told him plainly to his face, that he was ungrateful for the good his power received, by the diversion to the Romans from more serious thoughts on the loss of their liberty. ““Why do not you,” says he, ““let the people amuse themselves with our quarrels?”
This dancer had such great powers in all his tragedies, that he could draw tears from even those of the spectators the least used to the melting mood.
But in truth, the effect of these pantomimes, in general, was prodigious.
Tears and sobs interrupted often the representation of the tragedy of Glaucus, in which the pantomime Plancus played the principal character.
Bathillus, in painting the amours of Leda, never failed of exciting the utmost sensibility in the Roman ladies.