The last lesson of the term was a happy overview of all we hadn't talked about yet. Drama and pantomime were far from the only entertainments available to the Greeks. If that was the BBC prestege drama, then there was also a motley collection of reality TV for the masses - in other words, the Greek popular culture.


Jugglers, sword swallowers, knife throwers, acrobats, balancers, harpists, rope-walkers, clowns, boxers, stilt-walkers, magicians, puppeteers...


None of these ever achieved the respectability of tragedy, which is a shame because I think this all seems pretty fun. Unsuprisingly, the intellectuals divided legitimate entertainment, of taste, refinement, rational - from the unworthy crowd pandering, based in spectacle and show. Athenaeus complained that "the Greeks came to exteem vulgar skill of hand very highly, more than the ides of the cultivated intellect", and that they had "yielded to Potheinus the marionette-player the very stage on which Euripides and his contemporaries performed their inspired plays". It was sneered at as sensual, and senseless: "no significant contribution to make to the entertainment of the soul, because they have no meaning and no rational content, and cannot speak to us".



On some level, maybe they had a point. Horace complained about a performance where the actor "only needs to stand on the stage and hands start to clap", as the audience applause the richness of his dress, and ignore the words in favour of the spectacle of elephants. Seneca even paniced that their whole culture was threatened: "so many schools of philosophy are dying without a sucessor...but for pantomime, their arts there are many students and many teachers!"


This snobbery was rife in public life. A few posts back I mentioned that actors would perform in private contexts. Juvenal describes Spanish floor shows, then claims "you won't find frivolities like that in my humble home!", while Pliny - with his studied attitude to everything - asks "let us then be tolerant of other people's pleasures so as to win indulgence for our own". But only after clearly pointing out that he doesn't enjoy "a mime's impudence or a clown's folly".


Pliny was the original blogger, publishing his letters that he might air his views on pretty much everything. Reading a lot of them is funny, because of the carefulness of his style.


So what was considered legitimate by the high-brow, outside of drama? Supereducated orators who would improvise a speech, on Athenian history or on myths, in response to requests from the audience. Sounds like something I could do, actually. They would speak as a character, and was praised as entertainment for the brain. Did it catch on? Well it couldn't compete with the low-brow stuff, probably due to being really boring. So they pinched tricks from the enemy, made sure to dress well and sound impressive. Even serious historians such as Themistius liked to scorn the way these display orators would be "adorned in gold and purple, exuding the smell of perfumes and painted and rubbed with cosmetics all over, and crowned with garlands of flowers".

Lucian argued that pantomime could be reclaimed for the highbrow crowd, and that it was to the masses what tragic drama was to them. Nice try, Lucy.

So, to sum up Greek entertainment

The highest form of entertainment was drama, specifically tragedy. Initially, this was in the control of the city and part of the religious calendar: The City Dionysia, the smaller Lenaia and then the Dionysia in the fields. This gradually seeped out into a national obsession, helped by the invention of actors. Early drama was in the control of a single poet, who wrote, performed and directed. As up to three actors were allocated by the archon, the actor could exist separately as a career and gain autonomy from the poets, able to win their own awards and create their own repetoires.

Greek audiences expected the same of their actors as a modern audience, more or less. They liked to be moved, they liked realism (arguably not the same as we'd use the term). Plays were seen as didactic. In addition, they had the concept of "catharsis", or purging unhappiness through completion.

Pantomime dancing involved a single masked dancer, portraying a whole myth. It was both criticised and praised for it's femininity. Some people felt threatened by the genderbending, others regarded it as its greatest triumph.

There was a lot of regular entertainment around too, but this was scorned by intellectuals.

Next up: the Romans. Oh, no pansy flutes and womanliness for them...