IN SEARCH OF MASTERS AND SLAVES

The people of fourth-century Antioch were famously devoted to their theater. Built under the patronage of Julius Caesar, the theater of Antioch stood, there in the sloping foothills of Mount Silpius, as a monument of the city's deep Roman past. But it was not, in the late empire, a fossilized remain from an extinct culture. The theater was a vital institution, and the mainstream of theatrical culture in late antiquity was the comic mime. Mime was a form of dramatic comedy played by unmasked actors. Travesties of myth, lampoons of public figures, and ethnic mockery were common themes of this inherently irreverent genre. But the natural subject of the mime was the portrayal of everyday, domestic life. One description called mime “an imitation of life, encompassing the permissible and the shameful.” Peopled with a familiar array of stock characters, the mime act was a medium where the dramatic possibilities of the faithless wife, the clever slave, the harsh father, the fool, the parasite, and the miser were reconfigured in endless permutations. Masters and slaves were foremost among the stock characters of the genre. The basic symbols and character types of late Roman mime were enmeshed in the webs of significance produced by a violent and rigidly hierarchical social order. The mime – part slapstick, part sitcom, part minstrel show – was an organic cultural expression of a slave society.