VI. A ROMAN HOLIDAY
1. The Stage
Having many gods to worship, and many provinces to milk, Rome had many holidays, once solemn with religious pageantry, now gay with secular delight. In summer many of the poor fled from the humid heat to suburban or riverside taverns or groves, drinking, dining, dancing, and loving in the open air. Those who could afford it might go to the bathing resorts that lined the western coast, or sport with the rich on Baiae’s bay. In winter it was the ambition of every caste-conscious Roman to go south, if possible to Rhegium or Tarentum, and return with a coat of tan as a certificate of class. But those who stayed in Rome found entertainment plentiful and cheap. Recitations, lectures, concerts, mimes, plays, athletic contests, prize fights, horse races, chariot races, mortal combats of men with men or beasts, not-quite-sham naval battles on artificial lakes—never was a city more bountifully amused.
In the early Empire there were in the Roman year seventy-six festival days on which ludi were performed. Of these, fifty-five were ludi scenici, devoted to plays or mimes; twenty-two were games in the circus, the stadium, or the amphitheater. The number ofludi increased until by A.D.354 they were presented on 175 days in the year.91 This meant no growth in the Roman drama; on the contrary, the drama decayed while the stage prospered. Original dramas were now written to be read rather than played; the theater contented itself with old Roman and Greek tragedies, old Roman comedies, and mimes. Stars dominated the stage and made huge fortunes. Aesopus the tragedian, after a life of assiduous extravagance, left 20,000,000 sesterces. Roscius the comic actor made 500,000 sesterces a year and became so rich that for several seasons he acted without pay—a scorn of money that made this ex-slave the lion of aristocratic gatherings. The games of the circus and the amphitheater absorbed the interest and coarsened the taste of the public, and the Roman drama died in the arena, another martyr to Roman holidays.
Through emphasis on acting and scenery rather than plot or thought, the drama gradually yielded the stage to mimes and pantomimes. The mime contained little dialogue, chose its themes from lowly life, and relied on character sketches presented with skillful mimicry. Freedom of speech, having disappeared from the assemblies and the Forum, survived for a moment in these brief farces, when a mime would risk his head to earn applause by a double-entendre aimed at an emperor or his favorites. Caligula had an actor burned alive in the amphitheater for such an allusion.92 On the day when the parsimonious Vespasian was buried a mime imitated the obsequies. During the procession the corpse sat up and asked how much this funeral was costing the state. “Ten million sesterces,” was the answer. “Give me 100,000,” said the imperial cadaver, “and throw me into the Tiber.”93 The mime alone admitted women as actors; and as these were thereby automatically classed as prostitutes, they had nothing to lose by obscenity. On special occasions like the Floralia the audience called upon these performers to remove every garment.94 Both sexes attended these performances, as in our time. Cicero found brides there, and they found him.
By suppressing speech altogether, and raising the theme to subjects from classic literature, the pantomime (“all mimicry”) was evolved out of the mime. There was a profit in foregoing language; the polyglot population of Rome, of which a considerable part could understand only the simplest Latin, followed the action better when unburdened with words. In 21 B.C. two actors, Pylades of Cilicia and Bathyllus of Alexandria, came to Rome and introduced the pantomime—already popular in the Hellenistic East—by performing one-act plays composed only of music, action, gesture, and dance. Tired of dramas in ancient and pompous verse, Rome welcomed the new art, thrilled to the grace and skill of the actors, enjoyed the gorgeousness of their costumes, the splendor or humor of their masks, the trained and dieted perfection of their figures, the Oriental expressiveness of their hands, their quick and versatile impersonation of diverse characters, their sensuous enactment of erotic scenes. Audiences divided into frantic cliques and claques in support of rival favorites; women of high station fell in love with the actors, and pursued them with gifts and embraces, until one literally lost his head over Domitian’s wife. The pantomime gradually drove all rivals but the mime from the Roman stage. The drama succumbed to the ballet.