Theatre in Ancient Rome: Background, Plays, Theory, and Variety Entertainments

As Greece declined, Rome was rapidly on the rise.  Legend has it that Rome was founded in 753 BC by Romulus and Remus, two brothers suckled by a wolf, who when grown had a falling out and fought. Romulus killed his brother, which is just as well as if his brother had won we’d be talking about not Rome, but about REME! (bada-bing!) Reme, sorry, ROME suffered under Etruscan domination for nearly two centuries.  Then in 509 BC the Romans threw off the Etruscan yoke and declared itself a republic.  Slowly it expanded its lands until by 265 BC it controlled the entire peninsula that we now think of as Italy.  By 240 BC it had taken over a significant number of Greek territories.  It is at about this time that Greek drama (as well as much other Greek culture, social structure, politics, and so on) was introduced to Rome, by a fellow named Livius Andronicus, who translated/adapted Greek tragedies and comedies, and acted in them as well.  While Livius is important as a historical “first,” we know little more about him than I have just written, and we have only small fragments of his and a few other writers’ plays from this period.  By 146 BC Rome

had conquered the Greeks and by the first century BC Rome had expanded into a vast territory.  For many years it remained a republic, but it evolved (or devolved, depending on your point of view), with the help of the assassination of Julius Caesar and a subsequent civil war in which Marc Antony was defeated by Octavian, from a republic into an empire. Octavian became

Augustus Caesar, Its first emperor. The empire thrived and expanded for a time, then, as all empires do, it grew weak and decadent, and finally collapsed. 

The standard dates are:  509 BC - 27 BC = republic; 27 BC - 476 AD = empire.

   

As opposed to the strong position of drama in ancient Greece, theatre in Rome played a relatively small role compared to popular entertainments.  It was still performed in festivals to the gods, but only as a portion of what have been called “variety entertainments” -- juggling, prize fighting, horse racing, acrobatics, and competitive sports, many of these handed down from Etruscan games.  Roman festivals, no less sacred than those of the Greeks, offered a different, carnival-like atmosphere.

It’s been said in an oversimplification that the Greeks were philosophers, the Romans engineers, the Greeks were theorists, the Romans were practitioners.  Romans simply adopted for themselves aspects about Greece they approved of, and discarded others. The Romans had no need to invent gods, for example, they merely re-named them: for example, the Greek Zeus became the Roman Jupiter; Aphrodite became Venus; and Dionysos became Bacchus.

   

As they co-opted the gods of the Greeks, the Romans also co-opted Greek drama, particularly Greek new comedies by Menander.  Roman writers took Greek plays and adapted them, sometimes merely translating a single Greek play, sometimes taking pieces of Greek plays and mixing them together.  As we know in this course,

Dr Jack did two productions of Forum - here he played
Senex (second from left), and in the other he played
Marcus Leicus -- in both shows he was VERY good!

their story is OUR story. Stephen Sondheim reached back deep into theatre history in a similar manner. He took three Roman comedies by Plautus, mixed them into one very silly story, added some delightful music, and created A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Forum was not the only time Sondheim made use of theatre history to create a new work of theatrical art – Sweeney Todd anyone? Nor was he the only recent theatrical practitioner to do so. Reason 1,485 (or 86, but who’s counting?) to study theatre history!

In the 900 years of Roman republic and empire, only 200 years are significant in terms of written drama.  After the empire was formed, theatricals became more and more lavish and spectacle oriented. But even before the empire we read of outrageous processions added to plays, such as in 55 BC, when, in the inaugural production of Rome’s first permanent theatre (a play called Clytemnestra), this sort of display occurred:

“We are informed that 500 mules and 3000 chariots, besides elephants and giraffes innumerable, took hours to pass the stage...they formed a processional spectacle of the trophies borne from ruined Troy.” (Nagler, Sourcebook in Theatre History)

As we move through theatre history we’ll see that Rome was not the only society that suffered from fondness of excessive spectacle.

   

Complete plays by only three playwrights are left to us, and one of the writers was probably never produced!  The two who were produced wrote comedy; their names Plautus and Terence.   Titus Maccius Plautus (c 254 - c 184 BC), came first, and he was tremendously popular.  Twenty-one of his plays have come down to us and all were modeled on Greek new comedy. They may have been mere translations, but since none of the originals survive, we can never be sure how “creative” Plautus was.  He wrote farce -- plays like Miles Gloriosus (The Braggart Soldier), in which the title character, with the terrific name of Pyrgopolinices, is defined by his first words:

“See that my shield be polished so that its sheen is more resplendent than the noon-day sun...but ah! my sword: how doleful and sad is its spirit, lamenting from long disuse!  How eagerly it pines to make havoc of my foes!”   

But in the final scene of the play Pyrgo is mercilessly cudgeled and shows his true character, whining, “By Venus and Mars, I bear no malice for this affront.  You were quite right, entirely right!”

In another play, The Pot of Gold, Plautus’s hero Euclio was transformed by Moliére into The Miser; and of course Plautus’s Menaechmi became Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, which became Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse. It was even made into The Bombitty of Errors, a hip-hop-pera! See my mention of Sondheim just above. Study theatre history, and then make use of it!  Plautus’s plays were strong on plots, especially tricky and complicated ones; they were farcical in nature, and featured musical accompaniment, so much so that they could be called the first musicals.

Publius Terentius Afer (195 BC - 159 BC) was possibly the first black playwright (a claim that has been much debated), a slave brought to Rome from his native Carthage.  Terence’s plays were modeled on the new comedies of Menander, and six are extant,

among them Andria (the basis for Sir Richard Steele’s Eighteenth century sentimental comedy, The Conscious Lovers – more on that much later in the course) and Phormio. Whereas Plautus concentrated on tricky plots, Terence’s plays, while smartly plotted themselves, were more concerned with character.  Terence’s heroes were usually elegant young Roman gentlemen, usually in love, always annoyed at the restraints placed on their freedom by older men (usually their fathers), and slightly more complicated than characters in plays by Plautus.  Terence’s plays also tended to be more sentimental in nature than Plautus’s, the verse was more elegant (in fact he was used as a model for good Latin poetry by later ages) and Terence used less music than his earlier comic Roman counterpart. 

Both of these writers eliminated the chorus and placed all the action on the street.  One character eavesdropping on two others (taken from Menander’s “parasite”) was a device common to the two writers, used to complicate the action.

The Roman public, however, didn’t really care that much for drama – they accepted Plautus’s raucous horseplay; and some of the intellectuals – certainly the young male intellectuals – appreciated Terence’s sophisticated characters and verses. But all in all they’d rather be at the Colosseum.  The usually bloody entertainments being so popular, you can imagine what the Romans thought of tragedy.  In fact the only surviving tragedies are those by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD), though we know of others written by several different authors.  Seneca was an important philosopher as well as a dramatic poet.  He was one of the major spokesmen for the Stoic philosophy.  He needed all his stoic abilities for his last job, that being the emperor Nero’s tutor.  As his reward, when he declined in favor Nero offered him a choice: “Kill yourself, or I’ll have my men do it.”  Being a noble Roman, Seneca chose suicide.

   

In the PBS Masterpiece Theatre series I, Claudius (which every one of you should watch) there’s a wonderful scene in which the famous Roman poet and theorist Horace is reciting poetry at Augustus Caesar’s palace after a banquet.  Caesar and his family yawn, burp and snore through it.  When Horace is finished, Claudius (future emperor of Rome, played brilliantly by Derek Jacobi) is the only one who’s been listening, and applauds loudly. The applause awakens Augustus, who proceeds to praise the verses he hasn’t heard.

This is how I imagine that Seneca’s plays were presented -- as after-banquet entertainments, not acted out, but recited, maybe by a professional actor, perhaps by the author himself.  The plays, though based somewhat on Greek models and on Greek stories, featured very different characteristics, which included lengthy soliloquies, scenes of violence and horror (on stage – but of course they weren’t performed), ghosts and other supernatural elements; the main characters were obsessed with a single passion, often revenge. The first speech of Thyestes offers a good example.

        Fall now this mighty house of famous Pelops,

        And crush me, so it crush my brother too.

        Come dare, my heart, a crime no age shall pardon

        But no age e’er forget.  Venture some deed

        Bloody and fell, such as my brother would

        Wish to be HIS.  Nothing avenges crimes

        But what surpasses them. (quoted in Allardyce Nicoll, Development of Drama)

As you read Seneca’s plays you realize why they were probably not acted out. They were the first so called “closet dramas” – plays meant to be read and not performed – and they were practically unplayable! That hasn’t kept them from being produced, however.

 A recent famous example is Seneca’s Oedipus, directed by Peter Brook, starring John Gielgud and Irene Worth. I should point out, apologizing if I gross you out as I do, that in Seneca’s version Jocasta does not hang herself, but impales herself on a spike, destroying the womb that bore her son/husband.  And Seneca’s play Thyestes features the banquet in which the title character serves up Atreus’s sons cooked in a pie.  As I mentioned in the post on Greek tragedy, the subject matter is often repulsive, sometimes horrific.  But then the same was sometimes true in real life.  Crassus, one-third of the triumvirate formed by himself, Pompey and Julius Caesar, lost his life in battle against the Parthians.  The victors sliced off his head, and used the severed head as a prop in a Greek play!  Life meets art, life loses! And we haven’t entirely lost a feeling for such subjects in the present day, on stage or in life.  Apart from grotesque violence, Seneca’s plays are probably most important in that writers of the Renaissance took them as examples for their own plays. Shakespeare’s first tragedy is Titus Andronicus, a Senecan- style revenge play par excellence!

So much for the writers, now for the great poet and and most important theoretician of his day, Horace (65 BC - 8 BC). 

In his work Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry), Horace discussed the writing of poetry, including dramatic poetry, as Aristotle had in Greece, but with a twist.  Aristotle had described how plays were written, and noted common characteristics.  He made some judgment calls, but Horace went further.  Horace prescribed rules for writing dramatic and other poetry.   These included insistence on a structure of 5 acts; no mixing of genres  (there should be no comic elements in a tragedy, for example.)  Horace didn’t care for the chorus and opted instead for a “confidant,” in whom the main character could... you guessed it...confide!  Deus ex machinae were to be avoided, and no violence should be shown on stage (that’s one rule Seneca ignored).  But the most important rule for Horace, was that in order to be worthy, poetry (including of course dramatic poetry) should teach as well as delight.  More about that important tenet later in the course, suffice for now to say that Horace’s rules are mightily important because they resound down the corridors of theatre history, and were made use of by different generations in different countries, beginning in the Italian Renaissance. 

   

Comedy and tragedy were relatively common in festivals given during the republic, but they were hardly the only forms of theatrical activity in Rome.  I’ve already pointed out that Romans loved a variety of entertainments. One of these, more theatrical than most, is Atellan farce, which had probably existed in

improvised form since the earliest days of the republic.  It began to be written down around 100 BC (though in performance it retained some improvisation), and from descriptions we know that these were short crude pieces that dealt comically with cheating, gluttony, and sexual exploits.  Stock characters. were used in Atellan farce, among them Bucco (a boisterous braggart), Pappus (a foolish old man), Maccus (a gluttonous fool), and Dossenus (a frightening, clever hunchback). Variations on some of these characters would re-appear many centuries later in Italy in commedia dell’arte.

   

Atellan farce was a special variation of the mime, which continued the Greek tradition of traveling troupes performing in short playlets featuring low humor.  Unlike the Greek troupes, however, Roman mimes played unmasked, and featured larger casts as well as a good bit more spectacle than their Greek counterparts.  As in Greece, only in mime were women allowed to perform.  The most prominent of the female mimes of the first century BC was Volumnia. To Roman audiences she was known under the Greek name “Cytheris.” For a few years she was Marc Antony’s mistress, and he was only one of her many escorts.  One scholar has complained, “One should like to know something about that lady’s achievements on the stage, but in this regard our sources are silent.”  Cicero writes in 66 BC of another female, the dancer Dionysia, who was paid the enormoussum of 200,000 sesterces at the games of either 67 or 66.

   

The most famous of these female mimes was Theodora, whose

Theodora is third from the left, in black robe
and crown

talent and beauty so pleased the emperor Justinian that he married her (not the last time in history that an attractive actress would interest a powerful politico).  Of course after she married the emperor she had to give up her acting, but she was, according to some biographers, a major force in the social reforms for which Justinian was responsible; according to other biographers she was a wicked, conniving, climbing leech. Ah, the certainties of theatre history!

What one could loosely call the earliest form of ballet had its start during the Roman empire – the pantomime.  In it a solo dancer played all the roles, donning a different mask for each character, while a chorus sang or chanted the story.  The pantomime was a star vehicle for the solo performer, but it was also an excuse for lavish spectacle:

There was a mountain of wood, fashioned after the likeness of that famous Mount Ida whereof the poet Homer sang.  It was built up into a towering structure, planted with shrubs and living trees, while from its topmost peak it sent forth a running stream that had its source in a fountain...A few goats cropped the young herbage...(the description goes on and on, but at the end Apuleius tells what happens to the mountain)...Then from the mountain’s topmost peak through some hidden pipe there spouted high in air saffron mingled with wine, which being sprinkled abroad fell in odorous rain about the feeding goats until they were died to a fairer hue and changed their natural whiteness for yellow. And now, while the whole theater was sweet with the scent, a chasm opened in the ground and swallowed up the mountain of wood. (Apuleius, quoted in Nagler, Sourcebook in Theatre History)

Along with Atellan farce, mime and pantomime, some of the most popular variety entertainments, chariot races, gladiatorial combats, throwing Christians to the lions, and so on, were certainly theatrical in nature. But my favorite has to be the naumachia! 

The earliest of these were presented on lakes, but later in the empire the interior of an amphitheatre, the Colosseum for example, was flooded and sea battles were staged, usually featuring ships filled with prisoners of war or slaves who were forced to fight, literally, to the death!  The Romans loved blood-sports, so much so that even leaders who were repulsed by the violence in these games were afraid to ban them – if they didn’t give them “bread and circuses” the people might well revolt.

The next lecture will feature Roman theatre spaces, design and performance, coming soon to a blog post near you!