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Virgil’s reported success in private and on stage suggests that the Bucolics could communicate on different levels:693 for the stage, they would fit right into the “polymorphous mode” of mime, “ranging from the outrageously licentious to the morally exemplary” and able to “deal with contemporary events and characters in a satirical way,”694 thus anticipating pantomime, which supposedly became a theatrical fashion late in Virgil’s life, as Richard Beacham recounts: This individual silent performer [of pantomime] was backed by musicians playing such instruments as the tibia, cymbals, drums, cithara, and scabellum (a clapper operated by the foot) and accompanied by either a single actor or a chorus that sang the part and provided the narrative continuity, during which the pantomime impersonated all the characters, male and female, in a series of interlinked solo scenes consecutively arranged.695 Beacham in the same context goes on to report: Quintilian notes that there could be two pantomimi “contending with alternate gestures ” and says that Augustus called one of them saltator (dancer) and the other interpellator (interrupter) (Inst. 6.3.65). The task of the performers was to give an impression of the whole ensemble and the relationship of one character to another while preserving the sense of the plot and creating graceful and expressive movements and gestures. Beacham’s emphasis both on “the whole” and on “the relationship of one character to another” invites analogies with the cues for performing eclogues, while he also prompts comment when he reports Lucian’s advice that a pantomimist know and be able to exploit the audience’s familiarity with a select literary tradition. The pantomimist, Lucian says, “will not be ignorant of anything Clues in Social Memory Threads from Tragedy and Epos 114 Clues in Social Memory that is told by Homer and Hesiod and the best poets, and above all by tragedy.” Hints of tragedy haunt Virgil’s book and swell to dominance toward its close, while Wiseman shows how tragic and tragicomic performances had long shaped public consciousness and identity at Rome (see n. 694). Lucian’s recipe, like many a list of required readings, may be wishful and skewed to reflect the bias of a satirist and a Greek. Yet pantomime presented familiar myths in reduced form, which sounds rather like the tradition sketched by Wiseman and like some riffs on myth in the Bucolics. Pantomime also strove for extremes of voice and gesture, dramatic turns and highs often cued by the Bucolics though all too rarely reached by the run of readers and translators. To be sure, Lucian’s emphasis on tragedy and heroic epos betrays a bias: that writing about the highest classes (especially from ages past and places far) was worthiest in style and theme, while comedy and mime, with their subjects nearer common folk and present times, were low. By this criterion the Bucolics, with their cast of herdsmen (even slaves), belong to the bottom of the social and literary scale, yet they are written in the meter of Homer and Hesiod, they hint frequently at heroic-tragic myth, and they rise to tragic style with themes of fatal love. Reference to “the best poets” betrays another Greek bias: the tendency to think of relationships as competing for some unique prize (the so-called zerosum game), with the inevitable focus on superlatives—best and strongest, fairest , foremost, first.696 Gods in legend fought to be most powerful, sons brutalizing fathers; goddesses connived to be called fairest. One, to win a beauty contest—bad behavior but a good story, therefore often told—bribed the judge (Paris, a herdsman-prince of Troy) by promising him ‘the fairest of the fair,’ though fair Helen was already married to the king of Sparta, Menelaus. His war to get her back from Troy stocked memory with yarns both heroic and tragic.697 Again, in the Bucolics Virgil shows knowledge not only of Homer, Hesiod, and tragedy but of poets later canonized as best, in part, perhaps, because he picked them out to emulate and outdo. The cultural focus on competition even generated an imaginary match between Hesiod and Homer,698 made to represent contrasting styles and themes.699 Their fictive bout also provided another cultural pattern: that victory may depend , not on popular acclaim, but on approval by the power that frames the contest.700 In the long run, but well before Virgil, “the poems of Hesiod and Homer . . . provided a synthesis of values and beliefs that created a ‘Panhellenic’ paradigm...

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