Hellenistic and Roman Mime

Exploring rhythm and voice through a musical setting of the Fragmentum Grenfellianum

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

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.

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.