This presentation focusses on the overwhelmingly unfavourable reputation that the theatre of the Roman mime had in the literary sources of the Republic and the Empire. My argument is that neither the extant fragments from the Latin mime-scripts nor the testimonia associated with mime-drama, when studied on their own, give us an accurate picture about mime as popular entertainment or about the elusive position of mime in the artificial literary and fluid social hierarchy of the Roman world. I consider select examples of the ancient reception of the Latin mime from Cicero to the late antique grammarians, and I demonstrate how epigraphical evidence and cemetery visual culture may challenge the misleading stereotypes of mime-theatre in the literary sources. This tension makes the picture of mime-drama more blurred and for this reason more convincing. I finish with examples of how new discoveries in art and archaeology open new perspectives in our study of ancient mime as text and spectacle.

This event will be in English.

CITY OF ROME LECTURE SERIES

Image: Three actors from a Roman mime (London, British Museum).

Costas Panayotakis teaches Latin language and literature at the University of Glasgow and has held Visiting Fellowships at the Universities of Cyprus, Göttingen, Melbourne, Oxford, Pisa, and at the BSR. His research focusses on the scabrous text of Petronius, the Satyrica, on Latin moral maxims and their impact, and on the “low” drama of the Republican period (Atellane comedy and mime), which now survives only in citations.