CHAPTER I

THE FALL OF THE THEATRES

[_Bibliographical Note._--A convenient sketch of the history of the Roman stage will be found in G. Körting, _Geschichte des griechischen und römischen Theaters_ (1897). The details given in L. Friedländer, _Sittengeschichte Roms in der Zeit von August bis zum Ausgang der Antonine_ (vol. ii, 7th ed. 1901), and the same writer’s article on _Die Spiele_ in vol. vi of Marquardt and Mommsen’s _Handbuch der römischen Alterthümer_ (2nd ed. 1885), may be supplemented from E. Nöldechen’s article _Tertullian und das Theater_ in _Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte_, xv (1894), 161, for the _fabulae Atellanae_ from A. Dieterich, _Pulcinella_ (1897), chs. 4-8, and for the _pantomimi_ from C. Sittl, _Die Gebärden der Griechen und Römer_ (1890), ch. 13. The account in C. Magnin, _Les Origines du Théâtre moderne_ (vol. i, all published, 1838), is by no means obsolete. Teuffel and Schwabe, _History of Latin Literature_, vol. i, §§ 3-18 (trans. G. C. W. Warr, 1891), contains a mass of imperfectly arranged material. The later history of the Greek stage is dealt with by P. E. Müller, _Commentatio historica de genio, moribus et luxu aevi Theodosiani_ (1798), vol. ii, and A. E. Haigh, _Tragic Drama of the Greeks_ (1896), ch. 6. The ecclesiastical prohibitions are collected by W. Prynne, _Histriomastix_ (1633), and J. de Douhet, _Dictionnaire des Mystères_ (1854), and their general attitude summarized by H. Alt, _Theater und Kirche in ihrem gegenseitigen Verhältniss_ (1846). S. Dill, _Roman Society in the Last Century of the Roman Empire_ (2nd ed. 1899), should be consulted for an admirable study of the conditions under which the pre-mediaeval stage came to an end.]

Christianity, emerging from Syria with a prejudice against disguisings[1], found the Roman world full of _scenici_. The mimetic instinct, which no race of mankind is wholly without, appears to have been unusually strong amongst the peoples of the Mediterranean stock. A literary drama came into being in Athens during the sixth century, and established itself in city after city. Theatres were built, and tragedies and comedies acted on the Attic model, wherever a Greek foot trod, from Hipola in Spain to Tigranocerta in Armenia. The great capitals of the later Greece, Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamum, rivalled Athens itself in their devotion to the stage. Another development of drama, independent of Athens, in Sicily and Magna Graecia, may be distinguished as farcical rather than comic. After receiving literary treatment at the hands of Epicharmus and Sophron in the fifth century, it continued its existence under the name of mime (μῖμος), upon a more popular level. Like many forms of popular drama, it seems to have combined the elements of farce and morality. Its exponents are described as buffoons (γελωτοποιοί, παιγνιογράφοι) and dealers in indecencies (ἀναισχυντογράφοι), and again as concerning themselves with questions of character and manners (ἠθολόγοι, ἀρεταλόγοι). They even produced what sound singularly like problem plays (ὑποθέσεις). Both qualities may have sprung from a common root in the observation and audacious portrayal of contemporary life. The mime was still flourishing in and about Tarentum in the third century[2].

Probably the Romans were not of the Mediterranean stock, and their native _ludi_ were athletic rather than mimetic. But the drama gradually filtered in from the neighbouring peoples. Its earliest stirrings in the rude farce of the _satura_ are attributed by Livy to Etruscan influence[3]. From Campania came another type of farce, the _Oscum ludicrum_ or _fabula Atellana_, with its standing masks of Maccus and Bucco, Pappus and Dossennus, in whom it is hard not to find a kinship to the traditional personages of the Neapolitan _commedia dell’ arte_. About 240 B. C. the Greek Livius Andronicus introduced tragedy and comedy. The play now became a regular element in the _spectacula_ of the Roman festivals, only subordinate in interest to the chariot-race and the gladiatorial show. Permanent theatres were built in the closing years of the Republic by Pompey and others, and the number of days annually devoted to _ludi scenici_ was constantly on the increase. From 48 under Augustus they grew to 101 under Constantius. Throughout the period of the Empire, indeed, the theatre was of no small political importance. On the one hand it was the rallying point of all disturbers of the peace and the last stronghold of a public opinion debarred from the senate and the forum; on the other it was a potent means for winning the affection of the populace and diverting its attention from dynastic questions. The _scenici_ might be thorns in the side of the government, but they were quite indispensable to it. If their perversities drove them from Italy, the clamour of the mob soon brought them back again. Trajan revealed one of the _arcana imperii_ when he declared that the _annona_ and the _spectacula_ controlled Rome[4]. And what was true of Rome was true of Byzantium, and in a lesser degree of the smaller provincial cities. So long as the Empire itself held together, the provision firstly of corn and secondly of novel _ludi_ remained one of the chief preoccupations of many a highly placed official.

The vast popular audiences of the period under consideration cared but little for the literary drama. In the theatre of Pompey, thronged with slaves and foreigners of every tongue, the finer histrionic effects must necessarily have been lost[5]. Something more spectacular and sensuous, something appealing to a cruder sense of humour, almost inevitably took their place. There is evidence indeed that, while the theatres stood, tragedy and comedy never wholly disappeared from their boards[6]. But it was probably only the ancient masterpieces that got a hearing. Even in Greece performances of new plays on classical models cannot be traced beyond about the time of Hadrian. And in Rome the tragic poets had long before then learnt to content themselves with recitations and to rely for victims on the good nature, frequently inadequate, of their friends[7]. The stilted dramas of Seneca were the delight of the Renaissance, but it is improbable that, until the Renaissance, they were ever dignified with representation. Roughly speaking, for comedy and tragedy the Empire substituted farce and pantomime.

Farce, as has been noticed, was the earliest traffic of the Roman stage. The Atellane, relegated during the brief vogue of comedy and tragedy to the position of an interlude or an afterpiece, now once more asserted its independence. But already during the Republic the Atellane, with its somewhat conventional and limited methods, was beginning to give way to a more flexible and vital type of farce. This was none other than the old mime of Magna Graecia, which now entered on a fresh phase of existence and overran both West and East. That it underwent considerable modifications, and probably absorbed much both of Atellane and of Attic comedy, may be taken for granted. Certainly it extended its scope to mythological themes. But its leading characteristics remained unchanged. The ethical element, one may fear, sank somewhat into the background, although it was by no means absent from the work of the better mime-writers, such as Laberius and Publilius Syrus[8]. But that the note of shamelessness was preserved there is no doubt whatever[9]. The favourite theme, which is common indeed to farce of all ages, was that of conjugal infidelity[10]. Unchaste scenes were represented with an astonishing realism[11]. Contrary to the earlier custom of the classical stage, women took part in the performances, and at the _Floralia_, loosest of Roman festivals, the spectators seem to have claimed it as their right that the _mimae_ should play naked[12]. The _mimus_--for the same term designates both piece and actor--was just the kind of entertainer whom a democratic audience loves. Clad in a parti-coloured _centunculus_, with no mask to conceal the play of facial gesture, and _planipes_, with no borrowed dignity of sock or buskin, he rattled through his side-splitting scenes of low life, and eked out his text with an inexhaustible variety of rude dancing, buffoonery and horse-play[13]. Originally the mimes seem to have performed in monologues, and the action of their pieces continued to be generally dominated by a single personage, the _archimimus_, who was provided with certain _stupidi_ and _parasiti_ to act as foils and butts for his wit. A satirical intention was frequently present in both mimes and Atellanes, and their outspoken allusions are more than once recorded to have wrung the withers of persons of importance and to have brought serious retribution on the actors themselves. Caligula, for instance, with characteristic brutality, had a ribald playwright burnt alive in the amphitheatre[14].

The farce was the diversion of the proletariat and the _bourgeoisie_ of Rome. Petronius, with all the insolence of the literary man, makes Trimalchio buy a _troupe_ of comedians, and insist on their playing an Atellane[15]. The golden and cultured classes preferred the pantomimic dance. This arose out of the ruins of the literary drama. On the Roman stage grew up a custom, unknown in Greece, by which the lyric portions of the text (_cantica_) were entrusted to a singer who stood with the flute-player at the side of the stage, while the actor confined himself to dancing in silence with appropriate dumb show. The dialogue (_diverbia_) continued to be spoken by the actors. The next step was to drop the _diverbia_ altogether; and thus came the _pantomimus_ who undertook to indicate the whole development of a plot in a series of dramatic dances, during the course of which he often represented several distinct _rôles_. Instead of the single flute-player and singer a full choir now supplied the musical accompaniment, and great poets--Lucan and Statius among the number--did not disdain to provide texts for the _fabulae salticae_. Many of the _pantomimi_ attained to an extreme refinement in their degenerate and sensuous art. They were, as Lucian said, χειρόσοφοι, erudite of gesture[16]. Their subjects were, for the most part, mythological and erotic, not to say lascivious, in character[17]. Pylades the Cilician, who, with his great rival Bathyllus the Alexandrian, brought the dance to its first perfection under Augustus, favoured satyric themes; but this mode does not appear to have endured. Practically the dancers were the tragedians, and the mimes were the comedians, of the Empire. The old Etruscan name for an actor, _histrio_, came to be almost synonymous with _pantomimus_[18]. Rome, which could lash itself into a fury over the contests between the Whites and Reds or the Blues and Greens in the circus, was not slow to take sides upon the respective merits of its scenic entertainers. The _histrionalis favor_ led again and again to brawls which set the rulers of the city wondering whether after all the _pantomimi_ were worth while. Augustus had found it to his advantage that the spirit of partisanship should attach itself to a Pylades or a Bathyllus rather than to more illustrious antagonists[19]. But the personal instincts of Tiberius were not so genial as those of Augustus. Early in his principate he attempted to restrain the undignified court paid by senators and knights to popular dancers, and when this measure failed, he expelled the _histriones_ from Italy[20]. The example was followed by more than one of his successors, but Rome clamoured fiercely for its toys, and the period of exile was never a long one[21].

Both _mimi_ and _pantomimi_ had their vogue in private, at the banquets and weddings of the great, as well as in public. The class of _scenici_ further included a heterogeneous variety of lesser performers. There were the rhapsodes who sung the tragic _cantica_, torn from their context, upon the stage. There were musicians and dancers of every order and from every land[22]. There were jugglers (_praestigiatores_, _acetabuli_), rope-walkers (_funambuli_), stilt-walkers (_grallatores_), tumblers (_cernui_, _petauristae_, _petaminarii_), buffoons (_sanniones_, _scurrae_), beast-tamers and strong men. The pick of them did their ‘turns’ in the theatre or the amphitheatre; the more humble were content with modest audiences at street corners or in the vestibule of the circus. From Rome the entertainers of the imperial race naturally found their way into the theatres of the provinces. Tragedy and comedy no doubt held their own longer in Greece, but the stage of Constantinople under Justinian does not seem to have differed notably from the stage of Rome under Nero. Marseilles alone distinguished itself by the honourable austerity which forbade the _mimi_ its gates[23].

It must not be supposed that the profession of the _scenici_ ever became an honourable one in the eyes of the Roman law. They were for the most part slaves or at best freedmen. They were deliberately branded with _infamia_ or incapacity for civil rights. This _infamia_ was of two kinds, depending respectively upon the action of the censors as guardians of public dignity and that of the praetors as presidents in the law courts. The censors habitually excluded actors from the _ius suffragii_ and the _ius honorum_, the rights of voting and of holding senatorial or equestrian rank; the praetors refused to allow them, if men, to appear as attorneys, if women, to appoint attorneys, in civil suits[24]. The legislation of Julius Caesar and of Augustus added some statutory disabilities. The _lex Iulia municipalis_ forbade actors to hold municipal _honores_[25]: the _lex Iulia de adulteriis_ set the example of denying them the right to bring criminal actions[26]; the _lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea_ limited their privileges when freed, and in particular forbade senators or the sons of senators to take to wife women who had been, or whose parents had been, on the stage[27]. On the other hand Augustus confined the _ius virgarum_, which the praetors had formerly had over _scenici_, to the actual place and time of performances[28]; and so far as the censorian _infamia_ was concerned, the whole tendency of the late Republic and early Empire was to relax its application to actors. It came to be possible for senators and knights to appear on the stage without losing caste. It was a grievous insult when Julius Caesar compelled the mimograph Laberius to appear in one of his own pieces. But after all Caesar restored Laberius to his rank of _eques_, a dignity which at a still earlier date Sulla had bestowed on Roscius[29]. Later the restriction broke down altogether, although not without an occasional reforming effort to restore it[30]. Nero himself was not ashamed to take the boards as a singer of _cantica_[31]. And even an _infamis_, if he were the boon companion of a prince, might be appointed to a post directly depending on the imperial dignity. Thus Caracalla sent a _pantomimus_ to hold a military command on the frontier, and Heliogabalus made another _praefectus urbi_ in Rome itself[32]. Under Constantine a reaction set in, and a new decree formally excluded _scenici_ from all _dignitates_[33]. The severe class legislation received only reluctant and piecemeal modification, and the praetorian _infamia_ outlived the Empire itself, and left its mark upon Carolingian jurisprudence[34].

The relaxation of the old Roman austerity implied in the popularity of the _mimi_ and _histriones_ did not pass uncensured by even the pagan moralists of the Empire. The stage has a share in the denunciations of Tacitus and Juvenal, both of whom lament that princes and patricians should condescend to practise arts once relegated to the _infames_. Martial’s hypocrite rails at the times and the theatres. Three centuries later the soldierly Ammianus Marcellinus finds in the gyrations of the dancing-girls, three thousand of whom were allowed to remain in Rome when it was starving, a blot upon the fame of the state; and Macrobius contrasts the sober evenings of Praetextatus and his friends with revels dependent for their mirth on the song and wanton motions of the _psaltria_ or the jests of _sabulo_ and _planipes_[35]. Policy compelled the emperors to encourage _spectacula_, but even they were not always blind to the ethical questions involved. Tiberius based his expulsion of the _histriones_, at least in part, on moral grounds. Marcus Aurelius, with a philosophic regret that the high lessons of comedy had sunk to mere mimic dexterity, sat publicly in his box and averted his eyes to a state-paper or a book[36]. Julian, weaned by his tutor Mardonius from a boyish love of the stage, issued strict injunctions to the priests of the Sun to avoid a theatre which he despaired of reforming[37]. Christian teachers, unconcerned with the interests of a dynasty, and claiming to represent a higher morality than that either of Marcus Aurelius or of Julian, naturally took even stronger ground. Moreover, they had their special reasons for hostility to the stage. That the actors should mock at the pagan religion, with whose _ludi_ their own performances were intimately connected, made a good dialectical point. But the connexion itself was unpardonable, and still more so the part taken by the mimes during the war of creeds, in parodying and holding up to ridicule the most sacred symbols and mysteries of the church. This feeling is reflected in the legends of St. Genesius, St. Pelagia and other holy folk, who are represented as turning from the scenic profession to embrace Christianity, the conversion in some cases taking place on the very boards of the theatre itself[38]. So far as the direct attack upon the stage is concerned, the key-note of patristic eloquence is struck in the characteristic and uncompromising treatise _De Spectaculis_ of Tertullian. Here theatre, circus, and amphitheatre are joined in a threefold condemnation. Tertullian holds that the Christian has explicitly forsworn _spectacula_, when he renounced the devil and all his works and vanities at baptism. What are these but idolatry, and where is idolatry, if not in the _spectacula_, which not only minister to lust, but take place at the festivals and in the holy places of Venus and Bacchus? The story is told of the demon who entered a woman in the theatre and excused himself at exorcism, because he had found her in his own demesne. A fervid exhortation follows. To worldly pleasures Christians have no claim. If they need _spectacula_ they can find them in the exercises of their Church. Here are nobler poetry, sweeter voices, maxims more sage, melodies more dulcet, than any comedy can boast, and withal, here is truth instead of fiction. Moreover, for Christians is reserved the last great _spectaculum_ of all. ‘Then,’ says Tertullian, ‘will be the time to listen to the tragedians, whose lamentations will be more poignant for their proper pain. Then will the comedians turn and twist, rendered nimbler than ever by the sting of the fire that is not quenched[39].’ With Tertullian asceticism is always a passion, but the vivid African rhetoric is no unfair sample of a _catena_ of outspoken comment which extends across the third century from Tatian to Lactantius[40]. The judgement of the Fathers finds more cautious expression in the disciplinary regulations of the Church. An early formal condemnation of actors is included in the so-called _Canons_ of Hippolytus[41], and the relations of converts to the stage were discussed during the fourth century by the councils of Elvira (306) and of Arles (314) and by the third and fourth councils of Carthage (397-398)[42]. It was hardly possible for practical legislators to take the extreme step of forbidding Christian laymen to enter the theatre at all. No doubt that would be the counsel of perfection, but in dealing with a deep-seated popular instinct something of a compromise was necessary[43]. An absolute prohibition was only established for the clergy: so far as the laity were concerned, it was limited to Sundays and ecclesiastical festivals, and on those days it was enforced by a threat of excommunication[44]. No Christian, however, might be a _scenicus_ or a _scenica_, or might marry one; and if a member of the unhallowed profession sought to be baptized, the preliminary of abandoning his calling was essential[45].

It is curious to notice that a certain sympathy with the stage seems to have been characteristic of one of the great heresiarchs. This was none other than Arius, who is said to have had designs of setting up a Christian theatre in rivalry to those of paganism, and his strange work, the _Thaleia_, may perhaps have been intended to further the scheme. At any rate an orthodox controversialist takes occasion to brand his Arian opponents and their works as ‘thymelic’ or ‘stagy’[46]. But it would probably be dangerous to lay undue stress upon what, after all, is as likely as not to be merely a dialectical metaphor.

After the edict of Milan (313), and still more after the end of the pagan reaction with the death of Julian (363), Christian influences began to make themselves felt in the civil legislation of the Empire. But if the councils themselves were chary of utterly forbidding the theatre, a stronger line was not likely to be taken in rescripts from Constantinople or Ravenna. The emperors were, indeed, in a difficult position. They stood between bishops pleading for decency and humanity and populaces now traditionally entitled to their _panem et spectacula_. The theatrical legislation preserved in the _Code_ of Theodosius is not without traces of this embarrassment[47]. It is rather an interesting study. The views of the Church were met upon two points. One series of rescripts forbade performances on Sundays or during the more sacred periods of the Christian calendar[48]: another relaxed in favour of Christians the strict caste laws which sternly forbade actresses or their daughters to quit the unhappy profession in which they were born[49]. Moreover, certain sumptuary regulations were passed, which must have proved a severe restriction on the popularity as well as the liberty of actors. They were forbidden to wear gold or rich fabrics, or to ape the dress of nuns. They must avoid the company of Christian women and boys. They must not come into the public places or walk the streets attended by slaves with folding chairs[50]. Some of the rescripts contain phrases pointed with the bitterest contempt and detestation of their victims[51]. Theodosius will not have the portraits of _scenici_ polluting the neighbourhood of his own _imagines_[52]. It is made very clear that the old court favourites are now to be merely tolerated. But they _are_ to be tolerated. The idea of suppressing them is never entertained. On the contrary the provision of _spectacula_ and of performers for them remains one of the preoccupations of the government[53]. The praetor is expected to be lavish on this item of his budget[54], and special municipal officers, the _tribuni voluptatum_, are appointed to superintend the arrangements[55]. Private individuals and rival cities must not deport actors, or withdraw them from the public service[56]. The bonds of caste, except for the few freed by their faith, are drawn as tight as ever[57], and when pagan worship ceases the shrines are preserved from demolition for the sake of the theatres built therein[58].

The love of even professing Christians for _spectacula_ proved hard to combat. There are no documents which throw more light on the society of the Eastern Empire at the close of the fourth century than the works of St. Chrysostom; and to St. Chrysostom, both as a priest at Antioch before 397 and as patriarch of Constantinople after that year, the stage is as present a danger as it was to Tertullian two centuries earlier[59]. A sermon preached on Easter-day, 399, is good evidence of this. St. Chrysostom had been attacking the stage for a whole year, and his exhortations had just come to nought. Early in Holy Week there was a great storm, and the people joined the rogatory processions. But it was a week of _ludi_. On Good Friday the circus, and on Holy Saturday the theatre, were thronged and the churches were empty. The Easter sermon was an impassioned harangue, in which the preacher dwelt once more on the inevitable corruption bound up with things theatrical, and ended with a threat to enforce the sentence of excommunication, prescribed only a few months before by the council of Carthage, upon whoever should again venture to defy the Church’s law in like fashion on Sunday or holy day[60]. Perhaps one may trace the controversy which St. Chrysostom’s deliverance must have awakened, on the one hand in the rescript of the autumn of 399 pointedly laying down that the _ludicrae artes_ must be maintained, on the other in the prohibition of the following year against performances in Holy week, and similar solemn tides.

More than a century after the exile and death of St. Chrysostom the theatre was still receiving state recognition at Constantinople. A regulation of Justinian as to the _ludi_ to be given by newly elected consuls specified a performance on the stage ominously designated as the ‘Harlots’[61]. By this date the _status_ of the theatrical profession had at last undergone further and noticeable modification. The ancient Roman prohibition against the marriage of men of noble birth with _scenicae_ or other _infames_ or the daughters of such, had been re-enacted under Constantine. A partial repeal in 454 had not extended to the _scenicae_[62]. During the first half of the sixth century, however, a series of decrees removed their disability on condition of their quitting the stage, and further made it an offence to compel slaves or freed women to perform against their will[63]. In these humane relaxations of the rigid laws of theatrical caste has often been traced the hand of the empress Theodora, who, according to the contemporary gossip of Procopius, was herself, before her conversion, one of the most shameless of mimes. But it must be noted that the most important of the decrees in question preceded the accession of Justinian, although it may possibly have been intended to facilitate his own marriage[64]. The history of the stage in the East cannot be traced much further with any certainty. The canons of the Quinisextine council, which met in the Trullan chamber to codify ecclesiastical discipline in 692, appear to contemplate the possibility of performances still being given[65]. A modern Greek scholar, M. Sathas, has made an ingenious attempt to establish the existence of a Byzantine theatrical tradition right through the Middle Ages; but Dr. Krumbacher, the most learned historian of Byzantine literature, is against him, and holds that, so far as our knowledge goes, the theatre must be considered to have perished during the stress of the Saracen invasions which, in the seventh and eighth centuries, devastated the East[66].

The ending of the theatre in the West was in very similar fashion. Chrysostom’s great Latin contemporaries, Augustine and Jerome, are at one with him and with each other in their condemnation of the evils of the public stage as they knew it[67]. Their divergent attitude on a minor point may perhaps be explained by a difference of temperament. The fifth century saw a marked revival of literary interests from which even dignitaries of the Church did not hold themselves wholly aloof. Ausonius urged his grandson to the study of Menander. Sidonius, a bishop and no undevout one, read both Menander and Terence with his son[68]. With this movement Augustine had some sympathy. In a well-known passage of the _Confessions_ he records the powerful influence exercised by tragedy, and particularly erotic tragedy, over his tempestuous youth[69]. And in the _City of God_ he draws a careful distinction between the higher and the lower forms of drama, and if he does not approve, at least does not condemn, the use of tragedies and comedies in a humane education[70]. Jerome, on the other hand, although himself like Augustine a good scholar, takes a more ascetic line, and a letter of his protesting against the reading of comedies by priests ultimately came to be quoted as an authority in Roman canon law[71].

The references to the stage in the works of two somewhat younger ecclesiastical writers are of exceptional interest. Orosius was a pupil of both Jerome and Augustine; and Orosius, endeavouring a few years after the sack of Rome by the Goths to prove that that startling disaster was not due to Christianity, lays great and indeed exaggerated importance on the share of the theatre in promoting the decay of the Empire[72]. About the middle of the fifth century the same note is struck by Salvian in his remarkable treatise _De Gubernatione Dei_[73]. The sixth book of his work is almost entirely devoted to the _spectacula_. Like Tertullian, Salvian insists on the definite renunciation of _spectacula_ by Christians in their baptismal vow[74]. Like Orosius, he traces to the weakening of moral fibre by these accursed amusements the failure of the West to resist the barbarians. _Moritur et ridet_ is his epigram on the Roman world. The citizens of Tréves, three times destroyed, still called upon their rulers for races and a theatre. With the Vandals at the very gates of Cirta and of Carthage, _ecclesia Carthaginiensis insaniebat in circis, luxuriebat in theatris_[75]. Incidentally Salvian gives some valuable information as to the survival of the stage in his day. Already in 400 Augustine had been able to say that the theatres were falling on every side[76]. Salvian, fifty years later, confirms the testimony, but he adds the reason. It was not because Christians had learnt to be faithful to their vows and to the teachings of the Church; but because the barbarians, who despised _spectacula_, and therein set a good example to degenerate Romans[77], had sacked half the cities, while in the rest the impoverished citizens could no longer pay the bills. He adds that at Rome a circus was still open and a theatre at Ravenna, and that these were thronged with delighted travellers from all parts of the Empire[78]. There must, however, have been a theatre at Rome as well, for Sidonius found it there when he visited the city, twelve years after it had been sacked for the second time, in 467. He was appointed prefect of the city, and in one of his letters expresses a fear lest, if the corn-supply fail, the thunders of the theatre may burst upon his head[79]. In a poem written a few years earlier he describes the _spectacula theatri_ of mimes, pantomimes, and acrobats as still flourishing at Narbonne[80].

The next and the latest records of the stage in the West date from the earlier part of the sixth century, when the Ostrogoths held sway in Italy. They are to be found in the _Variae_ of Cassiodorus, who held important official posts under the new lords of Rome, and they go to confirm the inference which the complaint of Salvian already suggests that a greater menace to the continuance of the theatre lay in the taste of the barbarians than even in the ethics of Christianity.

The Ostrogoths had long dwelt within the frontiers of the Empire, and Theodoric, ruling as ‘King of the Goths and Romans in Italy,’ over a mixed multitude of Italians and Italianate Germans, found it necessary to continue the _spectacula_, which in his heart he despised. There are many indications of this in the state-papers preserved in the _Variae_, which may doubtless be taken to express the policy and temper of the masters of Cassiodorus in the rhetorical trappings of the secretary himself. The _scenici_ are rarely mentioned without a sneer, but their performances and those of the _aurigae_, or circus-drivers, who have now come to be included under the all-embracing designation of _histriones_, are carefully regulated[81]. The gladiators have, indeed, at last disappeared, two centuries after Constantine had had the grace to suppress them in the East[82]. There is a letter from Theodoric to an architect, requiring him to repair the theatre of Pompey, and digressing into an historical sketch, imperfectly erudite, of the history of the drama, its invention by the Greeks, and its degradation by the Romans[83]. A number of documents deal with the choice of a _pantomimus_ to represent the _prasini_ or ‘Greens,’ and show that the rivalry of the theatre-factions remained as fierce as it had been in the days of Bathyllus and Pylades. Helladius is given the preference over Thorodon, and a special proclamation exhorts the people to keep the peace[84]. Still more interesting is the _formula_, preserved by Cassiodorus, which was used in the appointment of the _tribunus voluptatum_, an official whom we have already come across in the rescripts of the emperors of the fourth century. This is so characteristic, in its contemptuous references to the nature of the functions which it confers, of the whole German attitude in the matter of _spectacula_, that it seems worth while to print it in an appendix[85]. The passages hitherto quoted from the _Variae_ all seem to belong to the period between 507 and 511, when Cassiodorus was _quaestor_ and secretary to Theodoric at Rome. A single letter written about 533 in the reign of Athalaric shows that the populace was still looking to its Gothic rulers for _spectacula_, and still being gratified[86]. Beyond this the Roman theatre has not been traced. The Goths passed in 553, and Italy was reabsorbed in the Empire. In 568 came the Lombards, raw Germans who had been but little under southern influence, and were far less ready than their predecessors to adopt Roman manners. Rome and Ravenna alone remained as outposts of the older civilization, the latter under an exarch appointed from Constantinople, the former under its bishop. At Ravenna the theatre may conceivably have endured; at Rome, the Rome of Gregory the Great, it assuredly did not. An alleged mention of a theatre at Barcelona in Spain during the seventh century resolves itself into either a survival of pagan ritual or a bull-fight[87]. Isidore of Seville has his learned chapters on the stage, but they are written in the imperfect tense, as of what is past and gone[88]. The bishops and the barbarians had triumphed.

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