city, these entertainments received a
new impulse from the performances of the Etruscan players (_ludiones_)
who had been brought into Rome when scenic games (_ludi scenici_) were
introduced there in 364 B.C. for purposes of religious propitiation.
These _(h)istriones_, as they were called at Rome (_istri_ had been
their native name), who have had the privilege of transmitting their
appellation to the entire _histrionic_ art and its professors, were at
first only dancers and pantomimists in a city where their speech was
exotic. But their performances encouraged and developed those of other
players and mountebanks, so that after the establishment of the regular
drama at Rome on the Greek model, the _saturae_ came to be performed as
farcical after-pieces (_exodia_), until they gave way to other species.
Among these the _mimi_ were at Rome probably coeval in their beginnings
with the stage itself, where those who performed them were afterwards
known under the same name, possibly in the place of an older appellation
(_planipedes_, bare-footed, representatives of slaves and humble folk).
These loose farces, after being probably at first performed
independently, were then played as after-pieces, till in the imperial
period, when they reasserted their predominance, they were again
produced independently. At the close of the republican period the
_mimus_ found its way into literature, through D. Laberius, C. Matius
and Publilius Syrus, and was assimilated in both form and subjects to
other varieties of the comic drama--preserving, however, as its
distinctive feature, a preponderance of the mimic or gesticulatory
element. Together with the _pantomimus_ (see below) the _mimus_
continued to prevail in the days of the Empire, having transferred its
original grossness to its treatment of mythological subjects, with
which it dealt in accordance with the demands of a "lubrique and
adulterate age." As a matter of course, the _mimus_ freely borrowed from
other species, among which, so far as they were of native Italian
origin, the _Atellane fables_ (from Atella in Campania) call for special
mention. Very probably of Oscan origin, they began with delineations of
the life of small towns, in which dramatic and other satire has never
ceased to find a favourite subject. The principal personages in these
living sketches gradually assumed a fixed and conventional character,
which they retained even when, after the final overthrow of Campanian