After Sulla’s time, though great actors like Roscius still played old rôles, the farce gained ground over the legitimate comedy. The farce, a more or less extemporaneous form, like the commedia d’arte shaped as much by the actors as by the authors, had long been in use as a brief epilogue to performances of tragedies. The form most frequently used was the so-called Atellana, named from an Oscan village in Campania which was captured by Rome during the Hannibalic war. At first Oscan players had presented these farces in the Oscan dialect. It is very likely that the many Campanians who were trying to make a living at Rome after they had been driven off their lands in 210 brought these amusing plays along to produce in the Oscan “colony” of Rome, and that in time the Romans discovered how entertaining they were and began to employ the players at festivals. One is reminded of how the producers of Vienna and Innsbruck have frequently invited the village players from the Tyrolese hill-towns to give their simple homemade comedies before sophisticated urban audiences.
The Atellan farces were usually spontaneous bits of improvised fun in which the witty players, unhampered by a fixed text, developed their own parts. There was much sameness of plot and rôle, usually a ridiculous situation at the expense of some extravagant character, the fat fellow, the old simpleton, the self-deluded wiseacre, the country bumpkin, or what not. There was also much display of countryside wisdom and frequently of broad and coarse wit. By Sulla’s day various city-wits—we know the names of some and have more than a hundred titles of their works—exploited this old form and wrote Latin farces on the Atellan models, obeying literary conventions so far as to employ verse instead of prose. Even Sulla, who was a devotee of the theater, tried his hand at writing this style of comedy.
But these plays also had to give way to something lighter, namely the mime. Simple realistic mimes had appeared at unofficial folk festivals for many years before literature became aware of them. They avoided such artificiality as mask and extravagant garb. They alone employed actresses for female rôles. They got their names from their special devotion to mimicry and caricature, but they proceeded to invade the whole field of comedy; and had the respectable togata not been bound by convention to exclude actresses on the stage and to adopt the mask, there is no reason why the two should not have merged. In fact the mime came to be a more realistic togata, and as such might have played a dignified rôle in literature. And in Cicero’s day there were writers like Laberius and actresses like Arbuscula and Cytheris who revealed an ambition to elevate the mime into the region of serious art. The fate of the mime, however, lay at the mercy of the rabble who demanded ever cheaper amusement. And the scenario writers of the late Republic and early Empire supplied it. They wrote plots and created female rôles that not even Arbuscula would play, and that self-respecting Romans would not go to see. And so the mime—which indeed lived on for centuries—fell into the class of the tawdriest performances.
The farces and the mimes, while incapable of embodying careful characterization or lines of any real literary value, could at their best provide a vehicle for current ideas and a fruitful entertainment in skilful caricature and much rollicking fun. Their descent to the lower strata of amusement was not so much the fault of the forms as of the audiences that determined their content. It is not surprising, therefore, that these audiences—eager for entertainment which might exclude all possibility of having to exercise the intellect—finally demanded an extravaganza that appealed solely to eye and ear.
Horace lived to see and bemoan the discovery of the pantomime which, as its name implies, was wholly mimicry, with nothing to disturb a lazy brain. What Pylades did with tragedy, Bathyllus of Alexandria did with comedy. He silently acted his rôles using interpretative gestures to the accompanying rhythms of seductive music. There at last the rabble found supreme satisfaction. But Horace at any rate in reviewing the history of the stage did not argue that every new change had marked progress. In his opinion the stage had descended to the lowest depth of inanity.
At Rome, as elsewhere, the drama had proved to be a fairly accurate barometer not of the culture of the educated classes but of the populace. Nothing in the form of official censorship had at any time exercised any serious effect upon the theater. The praetors and aediles were not to blame for what happened. They had placed good plays on the stage as long as could be expected at the risk of offending the masses. Time and again, relying upon their convictions as to the worth of a comedy, they had staged plays that had failed; they were willing to pay very high salaries, partly out of their own purses, to great actors like Aesopus and Roscius who tried to revive the best plays and to win back to the theater an intelligent group of listeners; they had set aside reserved seats first for the senators and later for the knights in order to secure good audiences for literary productions of a high order. Nevertheless the drama declined. What the people demanded had in the end to be provided.
Individual criticism probably served its purpose to some extent, but could not prevent the ebb. Men like Cicero ridiculed the cheap entertainments and refused to attend them, they went out of their way to encourage the better plays, and they did everything in public speeches, in their essays, and in their social functions to show their appreciation of serious actors like Roscius and Aesopus. Young poets like Asinius Pollio and Varius Rufus filed away at poetic dramas that were published for library shelves but never reached the stage. Critics like Horace wrote to prove that what the populace greeted at every change as a new and remarkable advance was nothing but a new step downward. And down it went. The drama in some form remained a necessity for the populace and they kept it at their level. The intelligent, who had in themselves, their companions and their libraries their own means of entertainment, deserted the theater which had grown unendurable to them.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Horace, Epist. I, 13: he mentions Pyrrha’s posture on the stage.
[2] Terence, Hecyra, 15-20.