Second-Class Actors:
Factors Leading to the Ostracizing of Roman Mimes

Kennethian M. Brown (Cleveland State University)

Today the word “mime”, commonly evokes actors with white-painted faces who perform in silence.  The mimes of antiquity, however, were quite different.  Those of ancient Rome were traveling actors who performed small skits in public, such as in marketplaces or festivals.  In Roman society, mimes were extremely popular, and yet their fame did not change their social status.  In fact, mimes were so low on the social rung that they were even ostracized throughout the Roman Empire.  The public’s frowning upon actors was nothing new, since acting as a profession was looked down upon, but mimic actors seemed to have been especially revolting. William Beare, in his book the Roman Stage, asserts that the stigma of mime acting was so strong that after Laberius was forced by Caesar to perform his mimes with former slave, Syrus, his fellow nobles would not allow him to be seated near them.  In addition, he also states that females were allowed perform as mimes at the festival of Flora, which of course was a great switch from the norm which would have had women remaining in the home.  In her article, “Did the Romans Degenerate?”, Emily Case states that the mimes were enacted by slaves or hired performers who were often women.  In this paper, then, it will be argued that it was the social standing of mimic actors that primarily caused the genre of mime to be scorned within Roman society, not the content.

The actors in mimes were common men, women and slaves acting out the vices of found within Roman society.  One vice in particular, adultery, so widespread in the 1^st century that it caused Augustus Caesar to enact marriage laws to curb the trend, and this was the predominate theme of the mimes.  The thesis is confirmed by comparing the actions of Roman society with the content and situations acted out in mimic comedy, and by analyzing the stratification of Roman society as it relates to women and slaves as well as general opinion of the two social groups.  Here, one finds that what caused the low social standing of the mimes was the fact that the majority of mimic casts were made up of women, former and current slaves and that mimic comedy would not have been repulsive to Roman society since it was a direct reflection of everyday Roman life.