Herodas and the Kitchen Sink

Abstract

‘Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.’ Voltaire's epigramfits Greek literature like a glove. In school and university syllabuses, just as in our own private reading, we concentrate on the best authors; and a large number of the merely good authors stay on the library shelves, neglected and unread except by a steadily decreasing number of experts in forgotten fields. How many of us are on terms of easy familiarity with the bittersweet epigrams of Asclepiades, or that remarkably modern opening of Heliodorus' novel, or (for that matter) with the mimianiboi of Herodas?Herodas was the major Hellenistic author of mimes. His work was singled out by the younger Pliny (Ep. iv. 3. 4) as the standard by which to assess contemporary poetasters in the field. Yet before 1889 he was no more than a name, to whom a few dull fragments could be assigned. In fact before 1889 the whole genre of Hellenistic mime, literary and non-literary alike, was a dark mystery, doubtless consigned to oblivion during the ages of Byzantine antischolasticism. To the immense popularity of mimes in late antiquity countless references in contemporary sources bear a distinctly scandalized witness. Some descriptions survived, a few definitions, many condemnations, but no texts.