Mime artist
Ancient Greece and Rome

The performance of mime originates at its earliest in Ancient Greece; the name is taken from a single masked dancer called Pantomimus, although performances were not necessarily silent. The first recorded mime was Telestēs in the play Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus. Tragic mime was developed by Puladēs of Kilikia; comic mime was developed by Bathullos of Alexandria. Mime (mimius) was an aspect of Roman theatre from its earliest times, paralleling the Atellan farce in its improvisation (if without the latter's stock characters). It gradually began to replace the Atellanae as interludes or postscripts on the main theatre stages; became the sole dramatic event at the Floralia in the second century BC; and in the following century received technical advances at the hands of Publius Syrus and Decimus Laberius. Under the Empire mime became the predominant Roman drama, if with mixed fortunes under different emperors. Trajan banished mime artists; Caligula favored them; Marcus Aurelius made them priests of Apollo. Nero himself acted as a mime. The mime was distinguished from other dramas by its absence of masks, and by the presence of female as well as male performers. Stock characters included the lead (or archymimus), the stooge or stupidus, and the gigolo, or cultus adulter.
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