Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/333

 ON THE ROMAN THEATRE. 307 which all remedieg seemed unavailing, they first caught at the theatrical spectacle, as an experiment to propitiate the wrath of the gods, the exercises and games of the circus having till then been their only public exhibitions. But the Histriones, whom for this purpose they called in from Etruria, were only dancers, and probably not mimetic dancers, but merely such as endeavoured to amuse by the adroitness of their movements. Their oldest spoken dramas, those which were called the Atellane Fables'^, the Romans borrowed from the Oscans, the original inhabitants of Italy. With these Saturce (so called because they were at first improvisatory farces, without dramatic coherence, for Satura means a medley) they rested satisfied till Livius Andronicus, more than five hundred years after the building of Rome, began to imitate the Greeks, and introduced the regular kinds of drama, namely. Tragedy, and New Comedy, for the Old was from its nature incapable of being transplanted. Thus the Romans were indebted to the Etruscans for the first notion of the stage- spectacle, to the Oscans for the effusions of sportive humour, to the Greeks for a higher cultivation. In the comic department, however, they showed more original genius than in Tragedy. The Oscans, whose language, early extinct, survived only in those farces, were at least so near akin to the Romans, that their dialect was imme- diately intelligible to Latin hearers : for how else could the Atellane Fables have afforded them any entertainment ? So completely indeed did they naturalize this diversion among themselves, that noble Roman youths exhibited the like performances at the festivals : on which account the actors, whose regular profession it was to exhibit the Atellane Fables, stood exempt, as privileged persons, from the infamy attached to other theatrical artists, namely, exclusion from the tribes, and likewise enjoyed an immunity from mihtary service. Moreover the Romans had their own Mimes. The unlatin name of these little pieces certainly seems to imply an affinity to the Greek Mimes ; but in their form they differed considerably from these, and doubtless they had local truth of manners, and the matter was not borrowed from Greek exhibitions. It is singular, that Italy has possessed from of old the gift of a very amusing though somewhat rude buffoonery, in extemporaneous speeches and songs with accora- panjnng antics, though it has seldom been coupled with genuine dramatic taste. The latter assertion might easily be justified by examination of what has been achieved in that country in the higher departments of the drama down to the most recent times. The former might be substantiated by many characteristic traits, which at present would carry us too far from our subject into the Saturnalia and the like. Even of the wit which prevails in the speeches of Pasquino and Marforio, and the well-aimed popular satire on events of the day, many vestiges may be found even in the times of the emperors, who were not generally favourable to such liberties. More to our present purpose is the conjecture, that in the Mimes and Atellane Fables we perhaps have the earliest germ of the Commedia delV Arte, of the improvisatory farce with standing masks. A striking affinity between these and the Atellanes appears in the employment of dialects to produce a droll effect. But how would Harlequin and Pulcinello be astonished to learn that they descend in a straight line from the buffoons of the old Romans, nay, of the Oscans^! How merrily would they thank the anti- quarian who should trace their glorious genealogical tree to such a root ! From the Greek vase-paintings, we know that there belonged to the grotesque masks of the [On the Atellance, see Varronianus, pp. 156 foil, ed, in,] 2 [Vo.rronian. p. 163 ; above, p. 258.] 20—2