Hanna Golab (ASCSA)
Choruses of mimes are our best witness for choruses in any dramatic genre in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but they remain sorely understudied. This paper focuses on the information we can extract from the extant sources on their choral artistic principles, in particular performative violence, sexualized language, gender-bending behavior, ethnicity-based humor, as well as the social marginality of chorus members. It also points out to performative drunkenness as a catalyst for discordant singing and uncoordinated dance. As such, mime choruses participated in what we now think of as the archaic comic ethos.
The paper discusses three mime choruses (Indians from P.Oxy. 413, worshippers of Cybele from P.Matr. 44+119, and Goths from P.Berol. 13927) and puts them in the context of broader choral culture, including pieces such as the comic hymn to the Mother of Gods from Epidauros (IG IV2 131, 3rd c. CE) and criticism of comic dramas by Aelius Aristides in his On the Prohibition of Comedy. This comparison demonstrates that the mime choruses were firmly rooted in traditional choral arts and seem to be the inheritors of the archaic comic aesthetics with perhaps the most substantial change being the lack of securely attested animal choruses, despite the strong presence of animals on the Graeco-Roman stage. This, in turn, means that we should nuance the teleological history of the comic genres’ evolution, which assumes a development from the early scatological and sexual humor to urbane and restrained jokes of depoliticized comedy in later periods (as in Arnott 1972; Hartwig 2014). We should also question the way we think of Old Comedy’s abusive and sexualized language as a function of free civic speech in democratic Athens, but of post-classical abusive and sexualized language as a characteristic of low-brow, popular culture (Henderson 1991, 29; Halliwell 2008, 215-263; contra Webb 2008, 118-119).
Lastly, the paper explores the possibilities of conjecture: can this evidence help us imagine what a comic chorus might have looked like in the case of writers such as Menander?