The economic and social factors that we have mentioned account for the fact that Plautus had to continue the Greek habit of doubling rôles even though he did not employ masks, and though he was not bound by any old tradition as to the proper number of actors.[16] Of course the rule of the three actors had broken down even at the time of Euripides, and Menander probably allowed himself five actors at times. Plautus often had ten or twelve characters, but he seems to get along with about four or five actors and in several instances with only three. This accounts for the somewhat artificial excuses that characters are constantly giving for leaving the stage when the actor has to scurry off to dress for a new rôle. Needless to say, this deficiency of actors must have exerted a restraining influence upon Plautus which he had to bear constantly in mind. It kept many scenes rather thin. When, for instance, in the Rudens after the young man has been searching for his sweetheart through three acts, and after he has just learned that she has been rescued from a shipwreck and a thieving slave-dealer, he suddenly comes face to face with her at last, one naturally expects at least a cheerful exchange of greetings. But he has not a word for her. It takes us aback unless we notice that the girl must be represented on the stage by a mute, because the actor who has been playing her rôle must now be engaged in playing another part. Or again, in the Pseudolus, where Ballio heaps abuse upon three characters, sends them off, engages in a futile monologue, and then calls out three others and continues his tirade, one comprehends the strange interruption by noticing that the second trio cannot exist until the first three actors have gone in and changed their garbs and voices. It will be remembered that Shakespeare suffered from the same technical difficulty. At the end of the Winter’s Tale we see far less of Perdita than we desire and we are hardly consoled by the knowledge that the actor who has been playing her rôle is now busy playing Hermione. Terence was not hampered to quite the same extent as Plautus by a lack of players, but the Greek convention reasserted itself later and was foolishly accepted in Horace’s Ars Poetica to the detriment of the later drama.
As we have said, the early Roman dramatists did not use masks and in fact employed the most simple make-up in quickly adjusted garments and wigs. With the extensive doubling and trebling of rôles there must have been an uncomfortable amount of recognizing of the actors. The late scholiasts like Donatus, who discuss these matters, wrote when masks were again unusual but when actors were more plentiful. They are therefore somewhat obscure about the earlier custom. Their guess that Roscius introduced the mask[17] to hide an ineffectual countenance may be true, but it is very likely that the Greek masks were introduced on the Roman stage—this happened about the Gracchan time—in order to facilitate the doubling of rôles and to remove the confusion that arose from the easy recognition of the actors. By that time Rome was so large and the theater crowd so extensive that the play of features would at any rate be missed by a large part of the audience, and the well-marked masks served the useful purpose of distinguishing the characters at a distance. Opera glasses have now removed that necessity.
There seems to be some misunderstanding about the social status of the Roman actors because our sources of information are late and do not always distinguish between the various periods. The facts now available seem to warrant the statement that slaves were not employed as actors during the first hundred years of the drama when most of the great comedies were written and produced. At that time the authors usually acted themselves, and authors and actors were united in a common guild, honored by the state in the Alexandrian manner by being assigned an official meeting place at Minerva’s temple. Livius and Terence were freedmen, to be sure, but out of respect for their art both were highly honored by the foremost men of the senate. The day when slaves had stigmatized the professions by their participation was still far off. Even in Sulla’s time the great rôles of legitimate comedy and tragedy were assumed by distinguished men like Roscius and Aesopus,[18] men whom Cicero was pleased to number among his friends. Actors gradually lost their position in society only by the deterioration of the drama—of which we shall speak later. It was apparently when the standard plays had to give way to farces and mimes that slaves had to be trained to take rôles which self-respecting citizens refused to play. Then the social brand was marked on the few who demeaned themselves by playing with the slaves. And thus in the late Republic we hear not a little of the cheapness of the actor’s profession. However, that stigma did not even then apply to the great actors who confined themselves to the parts of the good old plays. The exact story of the fall of the profession is lost to us. Cicero is quoted as having said in his De Republica that at Rome actors and others who took part in a profession of entertainment were deprived of their civic rights and had their names struck off the tribal registration list by the censors.[19] These words are assigned to Scipio in a dialogue whose dramatic date is 129 B.C. but, as in several other instances, Cicero may be allowing himself an anachronism. Livy happens to say, without specifying a date, that actors could not serve as soldiers in the Roman legions.
Now there are two possible explanations for this censorial stigma. It is possible that at one of the several puritanic assaults on the theater in the second century B.C.—and during one of these periods of reform the censor Nasica ordered a partly constructed theater to be torn down—a censorial brand may have been placed on the actors in order to discourage citizens from entering the profession. But it is quite as possible that in the early days when actors were difficult to secure for the public festivals some praetor in charge of the festival induced the censor to excuse actors from army service and that, following the Roman practice of using the military rôle for the voting list, he also struck the names of actors from the lists of the tribus. Later when the state was demoralized and slaves had filled the profession, the cancellation of the name, at first effected for practical purposes, may have been continued as morally appropriate. In Roscius’ day the stigma was associated not with appearance on the stage but with playing for remuneration, so that when Roscius ceased to accept a fee he could be raised to the knighthood by Sulla. This fact proves how unstable the theory of the actors’ disability really is and rather supports the view that removal from the tribal list was not at first intended so much as a stigma as an excuse from performing service away from Rome. At any rate the social brand did not apply to recognized actors in the standard drama.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Cic. Tusc. i. 106-7.
[2] Leo, Plautinische Forschungen, 106; Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus, 157; Kahle, De Vocabulis Graecis Plauti aetate: and Hoffmann, in Stoltz-Schmalz, p. 813, have made some interesting observations regarding the use of Greek words in Plautus but have failed to note the pertinent historical facts.
[3] The greeting ave is a curious instance of borrowing from the Punic. The word was perhaps brought back by the soldiers from their camps in the Punic parts of Sicily. The Romans had besieged the Punic forts of Lilybaeum for eight years.
[4] Plautus likes to address the soldiers of his audiences, cf. Capt. 68; Cist. 197; Cas. 87; etc.
[5] It is difficult to say when the great vowel-shift took place in Latin. It is clear that Greek words in Plautus like calamus, colaphus, and hilarus had not come under the influence of the shift. Either they were very recent arrivals or had been used so little in Latin folk-speech (like barbarus, a Greek term of abuse) that Plautus could spell them in the Greek fashion. Words like oliva, Hercules, Massilia, Tarentum were of course acclimated long before and took on the regular vowel changes of Latin. However it is probable that many Greek words that were adopted during the Pyrrhic and first Punic wars felt the full influence of the great shift. This shift seems to have begun after the twelve tables and the Duenos inscription and it was by no means over when Plautus wrote: cf. the inscriptional spelling mereto, soledas, Esquelino, Arimenese, popolom, saxolus, etc. It is difficult to see how Acragas (Agrigentum) could have got into frequent Latin usage before 262 B.C. It is highly probable that the vowel-shift in Latin, like the similar change in English, marks a politico-social shift, an emergence of a social group that pronounced certain vowels in a way not considered correct in aristocratic Rome. We may possibly associate it with the elevation of the plebeians after the Publilian and Hortensian laws of 339 and 287 B.C., which made the tribal assembly supreme in Roman legislation. The new tendencies in pronunciation would then be a strong factor in speech during the First Punic War. Furthermore, the fact that the dramatists could transform Δήμοφων to Demipho at one stroke shows how quickly a word would adapt itself to Latin custom. I feel sure that we have placed the arrival of most of the Greek words too early.