Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/52

42 by the chin, and in his love to me said kindly, 'My son, what doest thou yet in the house?'"

There is yet another development of the gesture-language to be noticed, the stage performances of the professional mimics of Greece and Rome, the pantomime par excellence. To judge by two well-known anecdotes, the old mimes had brought their art to great perfection. Macrobius says it was a well-known fact that Cicero used to try with Roscius the actor, which of them could express a sentiment in the greater variety of ways, the player by mimicry or the orator by speech, and that these experiments gave Roscius such confidence in his art, that he wrote a book comparing oratory with acting. Lucian tells a story of a certain barbarian prince of Pontus, who was at Nero's court, and saw a pantomime perform so well, that though he could not understand the songs which the player was accompanying with his gestures, he could follow the performance from the acting alone. When Xero afterwards asked the prince to choose what he would have for a present, he begged to have the player given to him, saying that it was difficult to get interpreters to communicate with some of the tribes in his neighbourhood who spoke different languages, but that this man would answer the purpose perfectly.

It would seem from these stories that the ancient pantomimes generally used gestures so natural that their meaning was selfevident, but a remark of St. Augustine's intimates that signs understood only by regular playgoers were also used. "For all those things which are valid among men, because it pleases them to agree that they shall be so, are human institutions. . . . So if the signs which mimes make in their performances had their meaning from nature, and not from the agreement and ordinance of men, the crier in old times would not have given out to the Carthaginians at the play what the actor meant to express, a thing still remembered by many old men by whom we use to hear it said; which is readily to be believed, seeing that even now, if any one who is not learned in such follies goes