Roman Dance Cultures in Context

Ancient pantomime is said to have been introduced in Rome under the principate of Augustus in the year 22 A.C. There are no extant accounts of its origins and development and efforts made at tracing them remain tentative. Recently, pantomime has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Lada- Richards, 2007; Webb, 2008; Hall&Wyles, 2008; Zanobi, 2014), but the investigation of its relation to the wider cultural milieu has not yet been fully undertaken.

The gestural vocabulary of Graeco-Roman tragic pantomime did not develop in isolation, but tapped into a broader cultural field of body language operating across multiple art forms. While we have limited information concerning the choreographic elements of pantomime per se, it is the contention of this paper that individual components may be recovered by examining the representation of analogous content in cognate media. The gestural expression of emotions or pathē was essential to the well-attested affective capacity of pantomime.

The dances of the Galli, the self-castrating priests of Cybele, emblematize the dynamic ambiguity of certain dance-forms at Rome: as Beard notes, the cult and its practices both expressed Roman ties to ancestral Phrygia and distanced Roman identity from its “Oriental” antitype (Beard 83; cf. Naerebout 157). Yet no study has fully described the role of such ambiguity in perhaps the most memorable account of the Galli’s dances to survive from antiquity, Catullus’s poem 63.

The grammarian Nonius writing in the late 4th/early 5th century CE says of the cinaedi that in earlier times (apud veteres) they were said to be either dancers or pantomimes. Modern scholarship has most often focused on this noun's more pejorative meaning as effeminate gender deviant or passive homosexual whilst often considering the performative aspect of the cinaedus as somehow prior or secondary to that of deviant.

One of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans features a remarkable dance-off between two hetairai (Dial. Meret. 3) – one of the few descriptions of female sympotic performance in all of Greco-Roman literature. Within the frame of the dialogue, Philinna, one of the hetairai, recounts the causes and consequences of that performance for her disapproving mother. On one hand, the fictional world of Lucian’s courtesans seems to be a vaguely classical-Athenian Greek past, and earlier Greek models are undoubtedly central to Lucian’s literary project (Bompaire 1958, Branham 1989).

This paper looks at two Roman triclinia from Gallia Narbonensis, both of which employ figures and compositional structures reminiscent of pantomime in their decor (Figs 1, 2). In these rooms, mosaic floors and frescoed walls are decorated in such a way as to transform the space into a stage, where guiding lines and scattered mythological figures on the floor coopt everyone in the room – guests and hosts, diners and servers alike – into the performance of the dance.