Criticism of Individuals in Roman Popular Comedy

Abstract

In the Old Attic Comedy contemporary figures were criticized in the most outspoken manner. The legitimate stage seems to have departed from this practice in part with the advent of the Middle Comedy, and almost completely in the New. It might be tempting to imagine that direct criticism of contemporaries could still have been found on the impermanent stages of the travelling mimes. But there is no evidence to show that this was so. From the beginning the Greek mime laid the emphasis on the portrayal of character, on the delineation of types rather than of individuals. In the information that we possess about the deikelistai and other forms of immature burlesque, about the comedy of Megara, and about the phlyakes of Tarentum, there is nothing to show that the little plays took any cognizance of contemporary events; the only individualized characters introduced are the gods and heroes of mythology. The fragments of Sophron and Epicharmus give no indication that they attacked men of their own times, while the extant mimes of Herodas, like the mimic imitations in Theocritus, are concerned solely with types of humanity, not with individuals.