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In a broad contextualization of ancient pantomime within cultural history, the reasons for the importance of research into ancient pantomime are explored: it represents a lost aesthetic of profound and widespread influence in ancient imperial culture; it played, quantitatively speaking, a more important role in educating the majority of inhabitants of the Roman empire in mythology than, for example, recitations of poetry; it was the main medium in which the prestigious tradition of classical tragedy was kept alive in the theatres of the Roman empire; it played a seminal role in the emergence of classical ballet, and subsequently, in the twentieth century, of avant‐garde Tanztheater (dance theatre). The theatrical spaces and the musical accompaniments (provided by the chorus and the hydraulis), of pantomime are given detailed attention. The hostile response that aspects of the perfomance: the dancer, his mask and the music, evoked from the Church Fathers and the place of pantomime in their rhetoric of anti‐theatricalism is also briefly explored.

This chapter explores the art form of pantomime through the perspective of the performer and attempts to get ‘behind the mask’ and discover the dancers themselves as living, breathing, embodied beings with their own perspective. The chapter reconstructs the experience of the pantomime dancer through examining the ancient evidence for the dance and the training undertaken by its performers; particular attention is given to the demands that this performance art made on the body. The ancient evidence is supplemented in the discussion by some testimony about similar mimetic dance forms today, such as North Indian Kathak dance, Balinese dance and Ballet. This modern testimony enables the author to explore the question of the interiority of the dancer, his relationship to his art and to the characters he embodied.

This chapter explores the symbolism of costume in ancient pantomime dance and the way in which it operates and is manipulated in the performance in order to communicate with the audience. The chapter re‐evaluates the ancient evidence for the costumes (including masks) of pantomime from the perspective of theatrical semiotics, thus attempting to unlock the costume's potential to further understanding of both the performance and the aesthetics of the art form. The ancient evidence is used to establish what the pantomime's costume would have looked like and the significance of the costume is then considered from the perspective of the character, dancer, audience and art form. The system of semiotics employed in pantomime is shown to be intrinsically different from that used in fully‐staged performances of Greek tragedy. The chapter concludes with the idea that the silk of the costume could stand as a symbol both for the performer's body and also the art form itself.

This chapter explores the relationship between pantomime dance and funerary iconography in Roman society. The similarities between the art form of pantomime and sarcophagus art are identified in their shared activities of: interpreting well‐known subject‐matter from mythology to their viewers, inspiring reflection on the human condition through a visual display, and engaging with the human body in a fundamental way. The discussion opens with a critique of an approach which explores the relationship between the two by looking at individual pantomime motifs on Roman sarcophagi. Instead the author follows an alternative approach and considers pantomime and sarcophagus imagery in terms of their subjects, their presentation and their actors. The chapter concludes with a section that looks at the viewers of pantomime and sarcophagus imagery.

A discussion of the evidence that, even before the Byzantine period, there were also female pantomime dancers on the Roman scene. Despite the terminological confusion created by the variety of terms used to describe dancers in the ancient sources, certain unarguable instances of references to female pantomime performers may not be explained away. The chapter reviews the evidence from inscriptions, especially at Pompeii, and argues that a crucial piece of epigraphic evidence from Gaul has been overlooked. This gravestone celebrates a teenage girl named Hellas, who had worked as a pantomime dancer in the Julio‐Claudian or slightly later period, and was memorialised as such by her proud father Sotericus. The conclusion that women were also celebrated performers of pantomime has important implications for our understanding of Roman culture.

This chapter explores the question of how far it is possible to establish the nature of the pantomime performance and the difference between ‘pantomime’ and ‘mime’. It engages with these questions through looking at five problematic texts, ranging in date from the 50s bc to the mid‐first century ad: Cicero Pro Rabirio Postumo 35, Catullus ap. Schol. Bern. on Lucan 1.544, Manilius Astronomica 5.478–85, Phaedrus 5.7.23–7, Philo De legatione 96. The chapter is not concerned to propose a particular hypothesis in relation to these texts, but aims to understand what the texts presuppose in terms of dramatic genre and the use of the chorus. The discussion overall explores the limitations of what we know and challenges an overly schematic or static view of pantomime performance.

The poets Statius and Lucan are both said to have written pantomimes, and this chapter considers the relationship of pantomime art to poetic texts. The chapter underlines the importance of the enunciated narrative to the performance. The chapter considers a wide range of evidence about the libretti of pantomime, from disparaging comments on the quality of the words composed specifically for the pantomime dancer, to the alleged small fragments embedded in authors including Petronius. The chapter considers the possible reasons for the apparent wholesale loss of the words which accompanied pantomime, and discusses what sort of poetry and verse forms would have been most suitable; in adapting the text for a tragedy, for example, monologue would have proved much more practicable than stichomythia. The performance evidence relating to Bathyllus and Pylades, the pantomime dancers credited with introducing the art form in the reign of Augustus, is given detailed attention.

This chapter concentrates on the themes chosen for the earlier pantomimes performed in Rome at the time of Augustus' public endorsement of the medium. It suggests that the literary sources can be usefully supplemented by thinking about two aspects of Augustus' relationship with pantomime that have hitherto received little attention. The first is the particular myths and symbols that Augustan propaganda utilised in Public Relations activities, such as the Roman Games, and architectural decoration (Apollo, Mars and Venus, the Danaids and the Niobids); the second is the incorporation of pantomime in festivals held in his honour, such as the Augustalia and the Sebasta Games held in Naples.

This chapter looks at the sources that assert that three sequences from the Aeneid were performed in pantomime—those dealing with Dido, Turnus, and the katabasis to the Underworld (tales dealing with love, death, violence, and vivid spectacle): Macrobius, for example, says that the love story of Dido and Aeneas is kept alive by the incessant gestures and songs of the actors; whilst Augustine suggests that the majority of his readers would be familiar with the episode between Aeneas and Anchises in the Underworld through performances of it in the theatre. Panayotakis argues that Virgil's poetry was important to the development of pantomime and of Latin literary aesthetics. This chapter engages with the issue of pantomime libretti.

The strong visual appeal of Ovid's Metamorphoses has long invited comparison with the pleasures of pantomime, most influentially in a publication by Galinsky. In the study of Ovid's references from exile to his poetry being ‘danced in the crowded theatres’, this chapter argues in detail that the obvious text for pantomime realisation is the Metamorphoses, rather than the Heroides (as has occasionally been claimed); through close attention to the detail in Ovid's poetry, it explores how the subject‐matter of that epic, with its compact vignettes of action, emotive rhetoric, exotic settings, and underlying emphasis on bodily transformation, must have been suggestive to pantomime dancers. Furthermore the chapter argues that there is plenty of action which could easily be represented through movement, gesture, and basic stage props. The discussion incorporates the crucial evidence of Jacob of Sarugh about pantomime performances of the myth of Apollo and Daphne. This chapter engages with the issue of pantomime libretti.

This chapter offers a challenge to the classification of Seneca's tragedies as ‘rhetorical tragedies’ or declamations. Although the idea that Seneca's tragedies might have been partially danced had been suggested as early as the 1920s, the chapter argues that Seneca's tragedies contain several types of passage that point precisely to the character of a fabula saltata (‘danced story’), and that this suggests that even if Seneca did not write them specifically for pantomime performance, that is as libretti, he may have been influenced by the new aesthetics and conventions of the popular medium in the composition of these scenes. He may have been visualising, as he wrote, a theatrical performance with dance and music rather than a recitation. He may have hoped that his new kind of tragedy, suited to the taste of the Neronian period, could offer a substitute for the popular genres of theatre.

In the development of the study of the affinity between parts of Senecan tragedy and what we know about the texts (libretti) danced in pantomime, the author of this chapter (a trained dancer herself) looks at three features in the dramas that have often been criticised: their loose dramatic structure, running commentaries on another participant's actions, and lengthy narrative set‐pieces. In close readings of key texts from several plays, including Troades, Agamemnon and Hercules Furens, the chapter shows how apparently intractable problems related to the possibility of staging the plays disappear entirely if pantomimic performances formed part of the entertainment; moreover, the very verse construction, rhythm, and style display features that would offer great potential for choreographic realization by a dancer. This has important implications for our understanding of Seneca's dramaturgy.

There is a possibility that one pantomime libretto based on a canonical tragedy does in fact survive. The candidate is a Latin hexameter poem, preserved only in a Barcelona papyrus, on the theme of Alcestis' death, familiar to the ancient world above all from Euripides' Alcestis. The metre of the poem is shared by the Aeneid, which is known to have been performed by pantomime dancers, and the theme, the death of Alcestis, is known from other sources to have attracted practitioners of the medium. Moreover, the structure of the narrative, which entails five separate sections devoted to five characters in the myth, culminating in the protracted death of the heroine, offers exactly the successive changes of role and emotive vignettes that would facilitate a pantomime performance. The chapter suggests some criteria of style that could be used to assess the suitability of verse for danced realization, and offers a brief account of a modern Italian experiment in recreating the art of the pantomime through a danced realization of this very text.

This chapter explores the cultural place held by the ‘idea’ of pantomime and looks at the respects in which pantomime proved itself ‘good to think with’ in the ancient world. The chapter is concerned with the paradoxical attitudes of the elite towards this art form and examines the possible reasons for the elite polemic narratives about pantomime. This is explored with particular reference to the cultural discourses surrounding sophists, rhetoric and pantomime. The discussion reviews the place of pantomime in the entertainment hierarchies and reveals the genre's formidable relational value. The chapter ends with the suggestion that pantomime may in fact have been perceived as a serious rival by the intellectual elite and was therefore appropriated, and controlled through, the discourse written upon it.

This chapter examines Lucian's On Dancing, one of the few surviving examples of a discourse offering a sustained treatment of pantomime dancing. The chapter aims to show that the use of rhetorical categories in descriptions of pantomime suggests a relationship of fundamental affinity between rhetoric and pantomime, rather than a straightforward opposition or hierarchy. The discussion looks at the terms used in the dialogue to describe the visual impact of the pantomime on the audience. Next special attention is given to the use of the categories of mimēsis, demonstration, and signification and their meaning in the intellectual discourse of the Second Sophistic. In discussion of mimēsis takes Proteus as an illustrative example. The final section looks at the relationship between pantomime, rhetoric, and the visual arts. Overall the chapter sheds a critical light on the view that the argument of the dialogue can be explained against the backdrop of a general preference for literary culture over visuality; instead the issue is shown to be rather more complex.

This chapter examines the value of the description of the ‘Judgement of Paris' pantomime in book 10 of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, as evidence for pantomime. The performance, which takes place in the theatre at Corinth, involves the characters Paris, Juno, Minerva and Venus all dressed in beautiful costumes. The chapter attempts to offer a solution to the notorious ‘problem’ of the elements in this description which do not conform to the accepted view of what a pantomime performance conventionally involved, such as for examples the use of multiple soloists. The discussion takes a closer look at these unusual elements in the description of the performance and discusses them in light of other evidence relating to pantomime, such as the pulpitum in the theatre of Sabratha. The passage is then placed within its context in the narrative and the novel as a whole. The chapter makes the suggestion that description of the pantomime may have substantial significance for the interpretation of the work as a whole.

It was ancient pantomime's destiny to play a seminal role in the emergence of classical ballet, and subsequently, in the twentieth century, of avant‐garde Tanztheater. It is well known that the founding fathers of opera in the Florentine Camerata looked to ancient myth, and above all what they believed to have been the all‐sung form taken by ancient theatrical tragic performances, as the model for their new medium. But considerably less exposure has been given to the genealogy traced by the inventors of ballet in Enlightenment Italy, Spain, France and England, to the dancers described in the ancient texts on pantomime. The ancient dances, brought to such a high level of artistry and skill by the ancient star performers named Pylades or Bathyllus, Hylas, or Paris, fundamentally informed, many centuries later, the nature of modern dance theatre in Early Modern culture. The final chapter in this volume therefore briefly outlines some of the uses to which some late seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century dance theorists, such as Weaver and Noverre, put their knowledge of ancient pantomime in their treatises on dance.

This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, melodramas, romances, and pantomimes effectively created popular Georgian Orientalism. Throughout this period, episodes drawn from the Arabian Nights facilitated critiques of domestic high politics while also establishing a vision of the Orient as despotic, wealthy, luxurious, and sensual. In the early decades of the 19th century however, dramatizations of “Sinbad the Sailor,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Aladdin” gradually supplanted tales and episodes that allegorized domestic politics, a change owing to the so-called orphan tales' ability to symbolically negotiate the tensions accompanying the sudden wealth creation and social dislocation associated with nascent industrial capitalism.

The Royalty Theatre, Tower Hamlets, was opened in 1787 by the actor John Palmer and provoked immediate attempts at coercive suppression by the combined forces of Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Haymarket (London’s summer season royal playhouse). This chapter analyzes not only how these attacks were organized but also how the Royalty sought to gain a popular local following by mounting charitable performances, by carrying its message within its new dramas, and by appealing to its local audience constituency, including local Jews. In 1803, the newly formed Society for the Suppression of Vice explicitly sought to interdict the renewal of the Royalty’s license (which came from local magistrates). The chapter traces the close links between the works it performed and the local population catchment within which it was situated.