"Better to burn": The Prima Mimarum and Political Friction in Fourth-Century Antioch

This essay argues that in the transitioning socio-sexual economy of late antiquity, the mima (female actor) posed a problem for cultural classifications and uses of feminine identity. Personified through social imaginaries of her performance was an incongruent somatic politics (the commingling of extra-legal, pansexual agency, and juridically martyred inexistence), a corporality fracturing ideological constraints both to contain and rupture the harlot/saint dichotomy caught between two religio-social structures: one based on civic shame, the other on universal sin. In the late Roman Empire, women of the stage (thymelicae; mulieres scenicae) were affiliated with, but escaped confinement to, either binary term (for better or worse), and the performer's civic power, her erotic multiplicity, and her mobility were incendiary forces that the law and Church sought to capitalize on, refashion, or curtail. To unpack the material-discursive basis for the hagiographic account of Pelagia, a fifth-century prima mimarum turned saint, the essay investigates late-fourth-century Antioch under the imperium of Theodosius and the spiritual guidance of John Chrysostom. In the essay's first section, "Ethos," mimae (and Pelagia as a concrete instantiation) are viewed through postclassical writings on (and against) sexuality to extrapolate an extra-legal, pansexual agency that eludes comfortable authoritarian circumscription. Section 2, "Kairos," mobilizes Arjun Appadurai's concept of commodity situation to identify the discursive mechanics that circulate the prima mimarum as depersonalized/martyred transitive property in specific cultural-economic modalities. In the late-antique Roman east the bodies of women were fungible "riches" traversing the friction of a shifting politico-financial economy, but the bodies of actresses, certainly pliable with legal statutes guaranteed by a centuries-old backstory of infamia, proved to be an imprecise and uncontainable excess when the two models of pagan civics and Christian universals came into conflict.