Macquarie University
Browse
- No file added yet -

Pantomime dancing and metamorphosis literature in Late Antiquity

Download (1.9 MB)
thesis
posted on 2022-03-28, 22:56 authored by Ray Harding
Almost coincident with the end of the Roman Republic and Augustus' assumption of imperial power, Tragedy, a genre Rome had inherited from Greece and never been entirely successful in adapting to its own ends, disappeared almost entirely from the literary record as a performance genre. Tragedy on stage would henceforth be restricted to the performances of the pantomimes wherein a single dancer would enact all the roles in a given tragedy. Pantomime along with its more low-brow travelling companion mime, which similarly replaced comedy as a genre, would remain the dominant theatrical performance styles in the Roman and subsequent Byzantine Empires until their banning under Canons 51 and 62 of the Council in Trullo seven hundred years later. Approximately twenty-five years after the generally accepted date for the introduction of pantomime to the Roman world by the dancers Bathyllus of Alexandria and Pylades of Cilicia, 23/22 BCE, Ovid, drawing upon a long-established Greek tradition would assay the first major account in Latin of the metamorphosis tales that were such a feature of the mythology Rome had inherited from its eastern neighbours. Tales which either involved incidences of metamorphosis or which were, like Ovid's 15 book opus, a compendium of such tales would appear again and again in both languages (but most frequently in Greek) over the next five hundred years - the last major example being the Dionysiaca of Nonnus written approximately 520CE, coincidentally very close to the point at which Justinian would deliver the first of a series of body-blows to pantomime by withdrawing support for theatre in order to finance his wars of reconquest in Italy. It is the contention of this thesis that there was what amounts to a symbiotic relationship between pantomime and metamorphosis tales that accounts both for the longevity of each and the temporal parallels between them. Simply put, a great deal of the popularity of the pantomime lay in the extraordinary plasticity of the dancers and their ability to embody thereby the transformations of the famous tales, and by doing so raise the tantalising possibility that the tales could be true. Despite long-held claims of the Roman 'invention' of the genre, modern scholars are in general agreement that what appeared at the court of Augustus at the beginning of the generation prior to the commencement of the Common Era, was simply a modification of a long pre-existing Greek practice. With this in mind it is the further contention of this work that pantomime and its retelling of the traditional Greek stories operated in parallel with the display orators of the Second Sophistic as a means by which those who identified themselves as Greek kept their culture and traditions alive during the long centuries of Roman rule.

History

Table of Contents

Introduction -- 1. "And astonishment took hold of all who were looking"; metamorphosis in the Ancient World -- 2. "Entered upon by all"; Greece and the dance -- 3. "The property of wax"; pantomime takes the stage -- 4. "New forms"; Ovid's metamorphoses and pantomime -- 5."A delightful glimpse of the show"; Apuleius and pantomime -- 6. "Visited by a demon";Procopius and the secret history -- 7. "An over-crowded tapestry"; Nonnus and the Dionysiaca -- 8. "Everything is Greece to a wise man"; pantomime's role in the struggle to maintain Greek cultural identity in the Roman Empire -- 9. "Vicisti Galilaee"; pantomime's fall from grace -- Conclusion.

Notes

Theoretical thesis. Bibliography: pages 297-318

Awarding Institution

Macquarie University

Degree Type

Thesis PhD

Degree

PhD, Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Ancient History

Department, Centre or School

Department of Ancient History

Year of Award

2017

Principal Supervisor

Ken Parry

Rights

Copyright Ray Harding 2017. Copyright disclaimer: http://mq.edu.au/library/copyright

Language

English

Extent

1 online resource (320 pages)

Former Identifiers

mq:70828 http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/1268133

Usage metrics

    Macquarie University Theses

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC