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Temporis Romanis
All the News Romans Need to Know
March 5, 140 B.C.
Rome, Italy
Theatre Attendance on the Decline
By Michelle Morginstin
Theatre is declining very rapidly, here
in Rome. Years ago, people flocked to every
festival to see the tragedies and comedies, but are
now interrupting the shows and are leaving to
view the other events that are taking place at the
festivals. This perplexes some loyal theatergoers.
At the last “Ludi Romani”, one of our most
important religious festivals, a man told me “It is
such a pity that not as many people are going to
enjoy the theatre anymore, especially because of
how great it has become. Theatre has such a long
and rich history in Rome; we have grown it and
made it a creation of our own.”
Roman theatre truly does have a rich
history. Like many of our traditions in Rome, we
borrowed the core ideas from Greece and other
locations, and then embellished to make them
better. Theatre started out very small as the
“Atellan Farce” that originated in Etruria.
Composed of slapstick humor, improbable
situations, and sometimes mimes, these short
skits were a major means of entertainment for us.
The full-length plays that we know
today were first discovered by Roman soldiers,
traders, and travelers during our conquest of the
Hellenistic kingdoms, when they saw the Greeks
performing them. These full-length plays were
then brought over and we began to perform our
own Latin versions. Thus, our golden age of
drama was born. Livius Andronicus, who
migrated from Greece, was the first artist to
translate and produce the Greek play for our
early Roman stages and influenced the many
other writers to come. He set the stage for
Gnaeus Naevius and other great native
dramatists.
The playwrights now write tragedies,
comedies, and histories, but the comedies prove
to be the most popular among us Romans. The
most common types of comedies are: bragging
soldiers, parasites, stupid old men, prostitutes,
and most popular: the clever slave. They set
these plays in foreign places to avoid our
government’s extensive censors and often
disguise the Romans that they wish mock and
insult as Greeks. Writers and producers have
kept the Greeks’ traditions of women not
performing on stage, but now won’t use masks,
as the Greeks did, so a larger variety of emotions
can be shown. The plays now take place mainly
at festivals and the actors only need to play one
character per play, unlike the Greeks.
This period of grand and elaborate
theatre is now coming to a screeching halt. The
fickle public is turning to other means of
entertainment, possibly because every thinkable
story-line has been told already. Like Terence, a
master of Roman comedy, has said: “There’s
nothing new under the sun; everything one says
has been said before.”
Source: Greek and Roman Theater by: Don
Nardo