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What’s in a genre? The audience experience(s) of palliata comedy and Roman mime

We probably all feel that we know what alcoholism is, but: how should we describe it? Liver cirrhosis? Drinking alone, in social isolation? When studying alcoholism, both representations are relevant: the former in the biomedical sphere, the latter in a psychological one. The face of alcoholism depends on your perspective; defining alcoholism proves to be an elusive task. Adding a historical dimension to this task makes finding pathological features even harder. Both drinking and drink transform over time.

Martial’s debt to mime runs deep, as he himself says and many scholars acknowledge (Neger 2012, Fitzgerald 2007, Sullivan 1991). Alberto Canobbio (2001) claims that mime played an important role in the “obscene turn” with which Martial reconfigured epigram as a realistic genre. This paper will argue that a major element of the projected realism of Martial’s poetry is its juxtaposition to contemporary mime performances, which would have resonated with his urban readers and situated his epigrams within a Roman context.

As early as Homer, Greek literature treats lamentation as a controlled substance: an indulgence which must be approached with moderation. This may seem strange, considering the brutal and graphic terms in which lament is often described. Nevertheless, the affect most consistently associated with Homeric lament is not pain, but pleasure (Flatt 2017). The poems repeatedly deploy formulae which thematize the terpsis gooio, the peculiar pleasure of lamentation.

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.

Seneca often discusses mental illness in his philosophical prose, explaining it in physical terms by showing its detrimental effects on the individual’s suffering body (e.g., Tranq. 1.2, 2.1, 2.6). In his writings, ills of the mind and moral flaws are not clearly differentiated, with vices often portrayed as forms of mental illness. This is the case for Seneca’s approach to drunkenness (ebrietas), discussed at length in his Epistulae morales (Ep. 83; 59), and philosophical essays and dialogues (Tranq. 17; Ir. 1.13; Q. Nat. 3.20).

Scholarship has investigated the pharmaceutical value of love filters as situated in between aphrodisiacs and poisons. The ancients were aware of the nefarious properties of these filters, as we see in Antiphon’s Speech against the Stepmother. In societies with arranged marriages, where romantic relationships appeared suspicious (see Elpinice’s romance with Callias, Laurin 2005, pp.

Studies concerning manumission and freedom in ancient Athens typically focus on the institution of paramone (legal obligations post-manumission) as a process that kept formerly enslaved individuals subordinate to their former enslavers. Scholars such as Rachel-Zelnick Abramovitz have argued that while slaves freed by this procedure are legally free, they are not entirely free from a social perspective (Zelnick-Abramovitz 2005, 2017).

Since Orlando Patterson's monumental work Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study in 1982 (republished with a new Preface in 2018), "social death" has been used variously to define slavery, describe slavery conditions, and analyze mechanisms of enslavement. While the concept has facilitated paradigm shift in the study of slavery across cultures and historical period, a certain circularity has also emerged.

The synergistic interrelation of the transatlantic slave trade, Euro-American settler colonialism, and the North Atlantic intellectual revolutions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries continues to be scrutinized across a range of fields, with striking and sometimes shocking results (see, purely e.g., Rosenthal 2018 on accounting and Downs 2021 on epidemiology).