Greek and Roman Mime
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The first recorded pantomime actor was Telestēs in the play Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus. Tragic pantomime was developed by Puladēs of Kilikia; comic pantomime was developed by Bathullos of Alexandria.
The Roman emperor Trajan banished pantomimists; Caligula favored them; Marcus Aurelius made them priests of Apollo. Nero himself acted as a mime.
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“Here Greek and Roman find themselves
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And Shakespeare treads again his stage,
And Chaucer paints anew his age.”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
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Let not our looks put on our purposes,
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