The chapter examines what features of ‘early Latin’ may be identified in the scripts that belong to the literary phase of a type of theatrical entertainment conventionally known as fabula Atellana. Despite being contemporaries of Caesar, Cicero and Varro, the major playwrights of Atellane comedy were linguistically closer to Plautus than to any of them, exhibiting linguistic features – morphology, syntax and lexicon – of third- and second-century BC authors. Much rarer are the occasions in which linguistic phenomena that were obsolescent or old-fashioned in chronologically ‘early’ Latin authors feature in the Atellane playwrights, and even then there are considerations of genre and register to take into account. The overall artistic effect must have been rich, carefully crafted and varied: ‘early’ words and constructions do not seem to be mechanically included in the scripts. The playwrights were conscious that their works formed part of an established comic tradition, and the ‘unclassical’ linguistic features were employed by them not to stress the long-standing history of Campanian/Oscan drama but to give variety to the register of a scene and enhance the comic moment.

My interest in the Roman mime originated in the early 1990s when, as a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, I studied under the supervision of P. G. Walsh the episodic novel of Petronius from a theatrical point of view (a revised version of my PhD Thesis appeared with the title Theatrum Arbitri: Theatrical elements in the Satyrica of Petronius (Leiden 1995)). During my analysis of theatricality in Petronius I realised how important to the author of the Satyrica, and to ancient novelists in general, mime was as a structural device, and how inadequate our primary sources were for an understanding of this unique theatrical form. Its significance can be seen both in the frequent exploitation of various mime-motifs by authors of widely divergent literary genres such as love-elegy, satire, and the novel, and in the prominent role mime played in the shaping of medieval and modern popular theatre.

What survives from the scripts of the Roman literary mime today comprises some 55 titles of plays, a number of literary fragments (not all of them considered to be genuine extracts) which amount to about 200 lines, and a collection of over 730 sententiae, some of which are attributed to the mimographer Publilius. It is far from certain that all of these one-line apophthegms, which lack a theatrical context and were composed in iambic or trochaic metres, were written by him. The length of the remaining mime-fragments, composed usually in senarii or septenarii, varies from one word to 27 lines.

Defining the Roman Mime

Nowadays the word ‘mime’, when used as a verb, indicates the acting of a play or a role, normally without words, by means of gestures and bodily movement. When used as a noun, it signifies the play that is being performed and the performer himself. This form of modern theatre should not be confused with what the Romans understood by the term ‘mime’, despite the features which both the Latin mimus and contemporary mime share. Mime in Roman culture was primarily a type of popular entertainment which covered any kind of theatrical spectacle that did not belong to masked tragic and comic drama, and in which actors and actresses enacted mainly low-life situations and used words in their performances.

The theatrical term mimus existed in the Latin vocabulary from at least the late third century BC, and had four possible meanings, not all of which are attested in sources belonging to the same era. It denoted an actor in a form of drama which was normally simple in structure and farcical in content (CIL 12, 1861; Varro apud Aug. De civ. dei 4.22, 6.1; Rhet. Her. 1.24), the improvised spectacle or the literary play which a mime-actor performed (Varro LL 6.61; Cic. De orat. 2.259), the literary genre to which mime-plays belonged (Cic. Pro Cael. 65), and (metaphorically) a hoax or sham or pretence which was staged at someone's expense (Sen. Contr. 1.5.2).