The origin of these farces, as indeed of all kinds of Latin comedy, and probably also of the literary satura, is to be found in the jokes and rude fun of the country festivals, and especially perhaps, as Horace tells us of the harvest amusements[521]:

Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem
Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit,
Libertasque recurrentis accepta per annos
Lusit amabiliter, etc.

Epist. ii. 1. 145 foll.

These amusements were always accompanied with the music and dancing so dear to the Italian peoples, and it is easy to divine how they may have gradually developed into plays of a rude but tolerably fixed type, with improvised dialogue, acted in the streets, or later in the intervals between acts at the theatre, and eventually as afterpieces, more after our own fashion.

In Cicero's day two kinds of farces were in vogue. In his earlier life the so-called Atellan plays (fabulae Atellanae) were the favourites: these were of indigenous Latin origin, and probably took their name from the ruined town Atella, which might provide a permanent scenery as the background of the plays without offending the jealousy of any of the other Latin cities.[522] They were doubtless very comic, but it was possible to get tired of them, for the number of stock characters was limited, and the masks were always the same for each character—the old man Pappus, the glutton Bucco, Dossennus the sharper, etc. About the time of Sulla the mimes seem to have displaced these old farces in popular favour, perhaps because their fun was more varied; the mere fact that the actors did not wear masks shows that the improvisation could be freer and less stereotyped. But both kinds were alike coarse, and may be called the comedy of low life in country towns and in the great city. Sulla's tastes seem to have been low in the matter of plays, if we may trust Plutarch, who asserts that when he was young he spent much of his time among mimi and jesters, and that when he was dictator he "daily got together from the theatre the lewdest persons, with whom he would drink and enter into a contest of coarse witticisms."[523] This may be due to the evidence of an enemy, but it is not improbable; and it is possible that both Sulla and Caesar, who also patronised the mimes, may have wished to avoid the personal allusions which, as we have seen, were so often made or imagined in the exhibition of tragedies, and have aimed at confining the plays to such as would give less opportunity for unwelcome criticism.[524]

About the year 50 B.C., as we have seen in the chapter on education, there came to Italy the Syrian Publilius, who began to write mimes in verse, thus for the first time giving them a literary turn. Caesar, always on the look-out for talent, summoned him to Rome, and awarded him the palm for his plays.[525] These must have been, as regards wit and style, of a much higher order than any previous mimes, and in fact not far removed from the older Roman comedy (fabula togata) in manner. Cicero alludes to them twice: and writing to Cornificius from Rome in October 45 he says that at Caesar's ludi he listened to the poems of Publilius and Laberius with a well-pleased mind.[526] "Nihil mihi tamen deesse scito quam quicum haec familiariter docteque rideam"; here the word docte seems to suggest that the performance was at least worthy of the attention of a cultivated man. Laberius, also a Roman knight, wrote mimes at the same time as Publilius, and was beaten by him in competition; of him it is told that he was induced by Caesar to act in his own mime, and revenged himself for the insult, as it was then felt to be by a Roman of good birth, in a prologue which has come down to us.[527] We may suppose that his plays were of the same type as those of Publilius, and interspersed with those wise sayings, sententiae, which the Roman people were still capable of appreciating. Even in the time of Seneca applause was given to any words which the audience felt at once to be true and to hit the mark.[528]

Thus the mime was lifted from the level of the lowest farcical improvisation to a recognised position in literature, and quite incidentally became useful in education. But the coarseness remained; the dancing was grotesque and the fun ribald, and, as Professor Purser says, the plots nearly always involved "some incident of an amorous nature in which ordinary morality was set at defiance." The Roman audience of the early Empire enjoyed these things, and all sorts of dancing, singing, and instrumental music, and above all the pantomimus,[529] in which the actor only gesticulated, without speaking; this and the fact that the real drama never again had a fair chance is one of the many signs that the city population was losing both virility and intelligence.

CHAPTER XI

RELIGION

It is easy to write the word "religion" at the head of this chapter, but by no means easy to find anything in this materialistic period which answers to our use of the word. In the whole mass, for example, of the Ciceronian correspondence, there is hardly anything to show that Cicero and his friends, and therefore, as we may presume, the average educated man of the day, were affected in their thinking or their conduct by any sense of dependence on, or responsibility to, a Supreme Being. If, however, it had been possible to substitute for the English word the Latin religio it would have made a far more appropriate title to this chapter, for religio meant primarily awe, nervousness, scruple—much the same in fact as that feeling which in these days we call superstition; and secondarily the means taken, under the authority of the State, to quiet such feelings by the performance of rites meant to propitiate the gods.[530] In both of these senses religio is to be found in the last age of the Republic; but, as we shall see, the tendency to superstitious nervousness was very imperfectly allayed and the worship that should have allayed it was in great measure neglected.