De saltatione

Lucian of Samosata

The Works of Lucian of Samosata, complete, with exceptions specified in thepreface, Vol. 2. Fowler, H. W. and Fowlere, F.G., translators. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1905.

I must give you the comment of another foreigner on this subject. Seeing five masks laid ready—that being the number of parts in the piece— and only one pantomime, he asked who were going to play the other parts. He was informed that the whole piece would be performed by a single actor. ‘Your humble servant, sir,’ cries our foreigner to the artist; ‘I observe that you have but one body: it had escaped me, that you possessed several souls.’

The term ‘pantomime,’ which was introduced by the Italian

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Greeks, is an apt one, and scarcely exaggerates the artist’s versatility. ‘Oh boy,’ cries the poet, in a beautiful passage,
  • As that sea-beast, whose hue
  • With each new rock doth suffer change,
  • So let thy mind free range
  • Through ev’ry land, shaping herself anew.

    • Most necessary advice, this, for the pantomime, whose task it is to identify himself with his subject, and make himself part and parcel of the scene that he enacts. It is his profession to show forth human character and passion in all their variety; to depict love and anger, frenzy and grief, each in its due measure. Wondrous art!—on the same day, he is mad Athamas and shrinking Ino; he is Atreus, and again he is Thyestes, and next Aegisthus or Aérope; all one man’s work.

    Other entertainments of eye or ear are but manifestations of a single art: ’tis flute or lyre or song; ’tis moving tragedy or laughable comedy. The pantomime is all-embracing in the variety of his equipment: flute and pipe, beating foot and clashing cymbal, melodious recitative, choral harmony.

    Other arts call out only one half of a man’s powers—the bodily or the mental: the pantomime combines the two. His performance is as much an intellectual as a physical exercise: there is meaning in his movements; every gesture has its significance; and therein lies his chief excellence. The enlightened Lesbonax of Mytilene called pantomimes ‘manual philosophers,’ and used to frequent the theatre, in the conviction that he came out of it a better man than he went in. And Timocrates, his teacher, after accidentally witnessing a pantomimic performance, exclaimed: ‘How much have I lost by my scrupulous devotion to philosophy!’

    I know not what truth there may be in Plato’s analysis of the soul into the three elements of spirit, appetite, and reason: but each of the three is admirably illustrated by the pantomime; he shows us the angry man, he shows us the

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    lover, and he shows us every passion under the control of reason; this last—like touch among the senses—is all-pervading. Again, in his care for beauty and grace of movement, have we not an illustration of the Aristotelian principle, which makes beauty a third part of Good? Nay, I once heard some one hazard a remark, to the effect that the philosophy of Pantomime went still further, and that in the silence of the characters a Pythagorean doctrine was shadowed forth.