THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

V. The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter XII - Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art

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Page 36

This new mime, which first seems to have come on the stage of the capital about 672, soon swallowed up the national harlequinade, with which it indeed in the most essential respects coincided, and was employed as the usual interlude and especially as afterpiece along with the other dramatic performances.(9)

9. Cicero testifies that the mime in his time had taken the place of the Atellana (Ad Fam. ix. 16); with this accords the fact, that the -mimi- and -mimae- first appear about the Sullan epoch (Ad Her. i. 14, 24; ii. 13, 19; Atta Fr. 1 Ribbeck; Plin. H. N. vii. 43, 158; Plutarch, Sull. 2, 36). The designation -mimus-, however, is sometimes inaccurately applied to the comedian generally. Thus the -mimus- who appeared at the festival of Apollo in 542-543 (Festus under -salva res est-; comp. Cicero, De Orat. ii. 59, 242) was evidently nothing but an actor of the -palliata-, for there was at this period no room in the development of the Roman theatre for real mimes in the later sense.

With the mimus of the classical Greek period--prose dialogues, in which -genre- pictures, particularly of a rural kind, were presented--the Roman mimus had no especial relation.

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