prevent overcrowding, was from the time of Pericles provided out of the public treasury. The whole population had a right to its Bacchic holiday; neither women, nor boys, nor slaves were excluded from theatrical spectacles at Athens.
The religious character of dramatic performances at Athens, and the circumstances under which they accordingly took place, likewise determined their externals of costume and scenery. The actor’s dress was originally the festive Dionysian attire, of which it always retained the gay Costume and scenery.and variegated hues. The use of the mask, surmounted, high over the forehead, by an ample wig, was due to the actor’s appearing in the open air and at a distance from most of the spectators; the several species of mask were elaborated with great care, and adapted to the different types of theatrical character. The cothurnus, or thick-soled boot, which further raised the height of the tragic actor (while the comedian wore a thin-soled boot), was likewise a relic of Bacchic costume. The scenery was, in the simplicity of its original conception, suited to open-air performances; but in course of time the art of scene-painting came to be highly cultivated, and movable scenes were contrived, together with machinery of the ambitious kind required by the Attic drama, whether for bringing gods down from heaven, or for raising mortals aloft.
On a stage and among surroundings thus conventional, it might seem as if little scope could have been left for the actor’s art. But, though the demands made upon the Attic actor differed in kind even from those made upon his Roman successor, and still more from those which the histrionic Actors.art has to meet in modern times, they were not the less rigorous. Mask and buskin might increase his stature, and the former might at once lend the appropriate expression to his appearance and the necessary resonance to his voice. But in declamation, dialogue and lyric passage, in gesticulation and movement, he had to avoid the least violation of the general harmony of the performance. Yet it is clear that the refinements of by-play must, from the nature of the case, have been impossible on the Attic stage; the gesticulation must have been broad and massive; the movement slow, and the grouping hard, in tragedy; and the weighty sameness of the recitation must have had an effect even more solemn and less varied than the half-chant which still lingers on the modern stage. Not more than three actors, as has been seen, appeared in any Attic tragedy. The actors were provided by the poet; perhaps the performer of the first parts (protagonist) was paid by the state. It was again a result of the religious origin of Attic dramatic performances and of the public importance attached to them, that the actor’s profession was held in high esteem. These artists were as a matter of course free Athenian citizens, often the dramatists themselves, and at times were employed in other branches of the public service. In later days, when tragedy had migrated to Alexandria, and when theatrical entertainments had spread over all the Hellenic world, the art of acting seems to have reached an unprecedented height, and to have taken an extraordinary hold of the public mind. Synods, or companies, of Dionysian artists abounded, who were in possession of various privileges, and in one instance at least (at Pergamum) of rich endowments. The most important of these was the Ionic company, established first in Teos, and afterwards in Lebedos, near Colophon, which is said to have lasted longer than many a famous state. We likewise hear of strolling companies performing in partibus. Thus it came to pass that the vitality of some of the masterpieces of the Greek drama is without a parallel in theatrical history; while Greek actors were undoubtedly among the principal and most effective agents of the spread of literary culture through a great part of the known world.
The theory and technical system of the drama exercised the critical powers both of dramatists, such as Sophocles, and of the greatest among Greek philosophers. If Plato touched the subject incidentally, Aristotle has in his Poetics (after 334) included an exposition of it, which, mutilated Writers on the theory of the drama. as it is, has formed the basis of all later systematic inquiries. The specialities of Greek tragic dramaturgy refer above all to the chorus; its general laws are those of the regular drama of all times. The theories of Aristotle and other earlier writers were elaborated by the Alexandrians, many of whom doubtless combined example with precept; they also devoted themselves to commentaries on the old masters, such as those in which Didymus (c. 30 B.C.) abundantly excelled, and collected a vast amount of learning on dramatic composition in general, which was doomed to perish, with so many other treasures, in the flames kindled by religious fanaticism.
8. Roman Drama
In its most productive age, as well as in the times of its decline and decay, the Roman drama exhibits the continued coexistence of native forms by the side of those imported from Greece—either kind being necessarily often subject to the influence of the other. Italy (with Sicily) has ever been the native land of acting and of scenic representation; and, though Roman dramatic literature at its height is but a faint reflex of Greek examples, there is perhaps no branch of Roman literary art more congenial than this to the soil whence it sprang.
Quick observation and apt improvisation have always been distinctive features in the Italian character. Thus in the rural festivities of Italy there developed from a very early period in lively intermixture the elements of the dance, of jocular and abusive succession of song, Origin of its native forms.speech and dialogue, and of an assumption of character such as may be witnessed in any ordinary dialogue carried on by southern Italians at the present day. Not less indigenous was the invariable accompaniment of the music of the flute (tibia). The occasions of these half obligatory, half impromptu festivities were religious celebrations, public or private—among the latter more especially weddings, which have in all ages been provocative of demonstrative mirth. The so-called Fescennine verses (from Fescennium in southern Etruria, and very possibly connected with fascinum = phallos), which were afterwards confined to weddings, and ultimately suggested an elaborate species of artistic poetry, never merged into actual dramatic performances. In the saturae, on the other hand—a name Saturae.originally suggested by the goatskins of the shepherds, but from primitive times connected with the “fulness” of both performers and performance—there seems from the first to have been a dramatic element; they were probably comic songs or stories recited with gesticulation and the invariable flute accompaniment. Introduced into the city, these entertainments received a new impulse from the performances of the Etruscan players (ludiones) who had been brought into Rome when scenic games (ludi scenici) were introduced there in 364 B.C. for purposes of religious propitiation. These (h)istriones, as they Istriones.were called at Rome (istri had been their native name), who have had the privilege of transmitting their appellation to the entire histrionic art and its professors, were at first only dancers and pantomimists in a city where their speech was exotic. But their performances encouraged and developed those of other players and mountebanks, so that after the establishment of the regular drama at Rome on the Greek model, the saturae came to be performed as farcical after-pieces (exodia), until they gave way to other species. Among these the mimi were at Rome probably coeval in their beginnings with the stage Mimi.itself, where those who performed them were afterwards known under the same name, possibly in the place of an older appellation (planipedes, bare-footed, representatives of slaves and humble folk). These loose farces, after being probably at first performed independently, were then played as after-pieces, till in the imperial period, when they reasserted their predominance, they were again produced independently. At the close of the republican period the mimus found its way into literature, through D. Laberius, C. Matius and Publilius Syrus, and was assimilated in both form and subjects to other varieties of the comic drama—preserving, however, as its distinctive feature, a preponderance of the mimic or gesticulatory element. Together with the pantomimus (see below) the mimus continued to prevail in the days of the Empire, having transferred its
