Mime, in Ancient Rome a spoken form of popular, farcical drama which, unlike the
fabula atellana and the silent acting of the
pantomimus, was played without masks. Soon after the introduction of Greek drama to the Roman stage in the mid-3rd century BC the Floralia, or festival of Flora, was founded, and this became a favourite occasion for the performance of mimes, where licence even went so far as to sanction the appearance of mime-actresses naked on stage. The influence of mime on the development of Latin comedy must have been considerable; much of the jesting and buffoonery which
Plautus introduced into his adaptations of Greek comedy would have been quite appropriate in the mime.
The mime differed from more conventional forms of drama by its preoccupation with character-drawing rather than plot. The distinctive costume of the mime-player was a hood or
ricinium—whence the name
fabula riciniata for a mime—which could be drawn over the head or thrown back, a patchwork jacket, tights, and the phallus; the head was shaven and the feet bare. The companies were small; Ovid speaks of a cast of three to take the roles of the foolish old husband, the erring wife, and the dandified lover. The plots were simple, the endings often abrupt.
In the 1st century BC the mime achieved a precarious status as a literary form when fixed scripts for mime-players were written. The fragments of their works that survive show that they had much in common with the
fabulae atellanae which the new mime-plays seem to have absorbed or replaced. But the popular mimes which all but drove other forms of spoken drama from the stage under the Roman Empire were largely impromptu, with dialogue in prose which the chief actor—the
archimime— was free to cut or expand at will. The sordid themes and startling indecency of the language, judged by some later fragments which have survived, seem to be characteristic of the mime in general. Not only was adultery a stock theme, but the Emperor Heliogabalus appears to have ordered its realistic performance on stage, and if the plot included an execution it was possible, by substituting a condemned criminal for the actor, to give the spectators the thrill of seeing the execution actually take place. It is hardly surprising that however popular the actors were, socially they were beneath contempt. They countered the opposition of the Church by mocking Christian sacraments; but gradually the Church got the upper hand and in the 5th century succeeded in excommunicating all performers in mime. Yet the mime lived on. Its simple requirements could be supplied in any public place or private house, and in such settings it continued to entertain audiences who were now officially Christian. Though forced to drop its habit of burlesquing the sacraments, it still scandalized the Fathers of the Church by its indecency and the immorality of its performers.
How far the mime survived the fall of Rome and the onslaught of the barbarians is doubtful. So simple a type of performance might arise independently at different ages and in different countries; yet precisely because of its primitive character it is hard to be sure that the classical mime ever became wholly extinct in Europe. The Middle Ages had their mime-players, who may have taken over from the
mimi, those last representatives of classical drama, something of their traditions, and handed them on to their descendants in the modern world.
