Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/429

409 ROMAN.] DRAMA 409 touched the subject incidentally, Aristotle has in his Poetics (after 334) included an exposition of it, which, mutilated as it is, has formed the basis of all later systematic enquiries. 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. ncln- &quot; The history of the Greek stage,&quot; says Sir Walter Scott, Q- is that of the dramatic art in general;&quot; and herein no doubt lies the broad distinction to be drawn between the drama of the Greeks and the isolated growths previously treated in this sketch. Yet though such is the case, though in the Roman drama the native elements sink into insigni ficance when compared with those borrowed from the Greeks, and though the literary element in the modern drama of the West is directly or indirectly derived from the same source, the Greek drama, both tragic and comic, had features of its own which it has been the principal aim of the foregoing brief account of it to mark. Tragedy never lost the traces of its religious origin ; and the festive purposes of comedy are most signally apparent in precisely that period of its productivity whose works are least con genial to modern feeling and taste. But such is the wonderful power of the highest kind of art, that the tragedy of the three great masters, though its themes are so peculiar to itself that they have never been treated with the same effect by the numberless writers of other peoples who have essayed them, &quot;hath ever been held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems ; &quot; and such is the commanding claim of genius, that Aristophanes, who cultivated a species of comedy of an altogether eccentric kind, occupies an eminence in his branch of the drama hardly more contestable than that of the great tragic triad in theirs. What is Hecuba to us that we should weep for her, or Antigone that our sympathy should accompany her on her holy errand, forbidden by human laws, but en joined upon her by the behest of Zeus and of Justice dwelling with the gods below, or Agamemnon that we should thrill with horror when his cries announce the wreaking of his doom ? Why can we laugh at the ribald repartees of hide-seller and sausage-seller, careless of the merits of the former of these advanced politicians, and catch something of the dew of the rain-bringing maidens as it falls upon their beloved land, where the Bromian joy greets the advent of spring ] Because in all these instances, and in every other, the art of the Greek drama, while winged by the individual power of genius, is at the same time true to its purposes as an art, and in harmony with Nature, who will not teach her laws or surrender her secrets of a sudden or to all. In its most productive age, as well as in the times of its &amp;gt;MAN 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 has ever been the native land of aetiug and of scenic representation ; and though Roman dramatic literature is in the main but a faint reflex of Greek examples, yet there is perhaps no branch of Roman literary art more congenial than this to the soil whence it sprang. The beginnings of dramatic performances in Italy are to be sought in the rural festivities which doubtless from a very early period developed in lively intermixture the ele- Origin ments of the dance, of jocular and abusive improvisations its nati of song, speech, and dialogue, and of an assumption of character such as may be witnessed in any ordinary conver sation among southern Italians at the present day. The occasions of these festivities were religious celebrations, public or private among the latter more especially wed dings, which have in all ages been provocative of mirth ful demonstrations. The so-called Fescennine verses (from fascinum, or from Fescennium in southern Etruria), which were afterwards confined to weddings, and ultimately gave rise to an elaborate species of artistic poetry, never merged into actual dramatic performances. In the saturce, on the Saturc other hand a name originally due to the goatskins of the shepherds, but from primitive times connected with the fullness 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 flute accompaniment. Introduced into the city, these entertainments received a new impulse from the perfor mances of the Etruscan players (ludiones), who had been brought into Rome when scenic games (ludi scenici) were, in 364 B.C., for purposes of religious propitiation, first held there. These istriones, as they were called at Rome (istri istrion had been their native name), who have had the honour of transmitting their appellation to the entire histrionic art and its professors, were at first only dancers and panto- mimists in a city where their speech was unintelligible. But their performances encouraged and developed those of other players and mountebanks, so that after the establish ment of the regular drama at Rome on the Greek model, the satitrcs came to be performed as farcical after-pieces (exodia), until they gave way to other species. Of these the mimi were at Rome probably coeval in their beginnings Mimi. with the stage itself, where those who performed them were afterwards known under the same name, possibly in the place of an older appellation (planipedes, bare-footed) 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 by themselves. At the close of the republican period the mimus had found its way into literature (through D. Laberius and others), and had been 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 ele ment. Together with the pantomirmis (v. infra) the mimus continued to prevail in the days of the empire, having transferred its innate grossness (for it was originally a representation of low life) to its treatment of mythologi cal subjects, with which it dealt in accordance with the demands of a &quot;lubrique and adulterate age.&quot; As amattei of course, the mimus freely borrowed from other species, among which, so far as they were of native Italian origin, the Atellane fables (from Atella in Campania) call Ateilai for special mention. Usually supposed to be of Oscan birth, they originally consisted in delineations of the life of small towns, in which dramatic and other satire has never ceased to find a favourite butt. The principal personages in these living sketches gradually assumed a fixed and conventional character, which they retained even when, after the final overthrow of Campanian independence- (210), the Atellancehad. been transplanted to Rome. Here the heavy father or husband (pappus), the ass-eared glutton (maccus), the full-cheeked, voracious chatterbox (imcco), and the wily sharper (dorscnus) became accepted comic types, and with others of a similar kind were handed down, to reappear in the modern Italian drama. In these characters lay the essence of the Atdlanae; their plots were extremely simple ; the dialogue (perhaps interspersed with songs in VII. 52