“Custodes ovium, teneræque propaginis agnûm,
Quæris ignem?—Ite huc: quæritis? ignis homo est.
Si digito attigero, incendam silvam simul omnem,
Omne pecus: flamma ’st omnia quæ video[529].”
During the period in which the works of Lucretius and Catullus brought the Latin language to such perfection, the drama, which we have seen so highly elevated in the days of the Scipios, had sunk into a state of comparative degradation. National circumstances and manners had never been favourable to the progress of the dramatic art at Rome; but, subsequently to the conquest of Carthage, the increasing size and magnificence of the Roman theatres, some of which held not less than 60,000 people, required splendid spectacles, or extravagant buffoonery, to fill the eye, and catch the attention of a crowded, and often tumultuous assembly.
Accordingly, in the long period from the termination of the [pg 324]Punic wars till the Augustan age, there scarcely appeared a single successor to Plautus or Pacuvius. That the pieces of the ancient tragic or comic writers still continued to be occasionally represented, is evident from the immense wealth amassed, in the time of Cicero, by Æsopus and Roscius, who never, so far as we know, condescended to appear, except in the regular drama; but a new tragedy or comedy was rarely brought out. This deficiency in the fund of entertainment and novelty, in the province of the legitimate drama, was supplied by the Mimes, which now became fashionable in Rome.
Though resembling them in name, the Latin Mimes differed essentially from the Greek Μιμοι, from which they derived their appellation. The Greek Mimes, of which Sophron of Syracuse was the chief writer, represented a single adventure taken from ordinary life, and exhibited characters without any gross caricature or buffoonery. The fifteenth Idyl of Theocritus is said to be written in the manner of the Greek Mimes[530]; and, to judge from it, they were not so much actions as conversations with regard to some action which was supposed to be going on at the time, and is pointed out, as it were, by the one interlocutor to the other, or an imitation of the action, whence their name has been derived. They resembled detached or unconnected scenes of a comedy, and required no more gesticulation or mimetic art, than is employed in all dramatic representations. On the other hand, mimetic gestures of every species, except dancing, were essential to the Roman Mimes, as also the exhibition of grotesque characters, which had often no prototypes in real life. The Mimes of the Romans, again, differed from their pantomime in this, that, in the former, most of the gestures were accompanied by recitation, whereas the pantomimic entertainments, carried to such perfection by Pylades and Bathyllus, were ballets, often of a serious, and never of a ludicrous or grotesque description, in which everything was expressed by dumb show, and in which dancing constituted so considerable a part of the amusement, that the performers danced a poem, a chorus, or whole drama, (Canticum saltabant.)
It is much more difficult to distinguish the Mimes from the Fabulæ Atellanæ, than from the Pantomimes or Greek Mimi; and indeed they have been frequently confounded[531]. It appears, however, that the characters represented in the Atellane dramas were chiefly provincial, while those introduced in the [pg 325]Mimes were the lowest class of citizens at Rome. Antic gestures, too, were more employed in the Mimes than the Atellane fables, and they were more obscene and ludicrous: “Toti,” says Vossius, “erant ridiculi.” The Atellanes, though full of mirth, were always tempered with something of the ancient Italian severity, and consisted of a more liberal and polite kind of humour than the Mimes. In this respect Cicero places the Mimes and Atellane fables in contrast, in a letter to Papyrius Pætus, where he says, that the broad jests in which his correspondent had indulged, immediately after having quoted the tragedy of Œnomaus, reminds him of the modern method of introducing, at the end of such graver dramatic pieces, the buffoonery of the Mimes, instead of the more delicate humour of the old Atellane farces[532].
These Mimes, (which, with the Atellane fables, and regular tragedy and comedy, form the four great branches of the Roman drama,) were represented by actors, who sometimes wore masks, but more frequently had their faces stained like our clowns or mountebanks. There was always one principal actor, on whom the jests and ridicule chiefly hinged. The second, or inferior parts, were entirely subservient to that of the first performer: They were merely introduced to set him off to advantage, to imitate his actions, and take up his words—
“Sic iterat voces, et verba cadentia tollit;