The Pantomimi were quite of a different class.  They were tragic actors, usually mute; they combined with the arts of gesture music and dances of the most impressive character.  Their silent language often drew tears by the pathetic emotions which they excited:  “Their very nod speaks, their hands talk, and their fingers have a voice,” says one of their admirers.  Seneca, the father, grave as was his profession, confessed his taste for pantomimes had become a passion;[33] and by the decree of the Senate, that “the Roman knights should not attend the pantomimic players in the streets,” it is evident that the performers were greatly honoured.  Lucian has composed a curious treatise on pantomimes.  We may have some notion of their deep conception of character, and their invention, by an anecdote recorded by Macrobius of two rival pantomimes.  When Hylas, dancing a hymn, which closed with the words “The great Agamemnon,” to express that idea he took it in its literal meaning, and stood erect, as if measuring his size—­Pylades, his rival, exclaimed, “You make him tall, but not great!” The audience obliged Pylades to dance the same hymn; when he came to the words he collected himself in a posture of deep meditation.  This silent pantomimic language we ourselves have witnessed carried to singular perfection; when the actor Palmer, after building a theatre, was prohibited the use of his voice by the magistrates.  It was then he powerfully affected the audience by the eloquence of his action in the tragic pantomime of Don Juan![34]

These pantomimi seem to have been held in great honour; many were children of the Graces and the Virtues!  The tragic and the comic masks were among the ornaments of the sepulchral monuments of an archmime and a pantomime.  Montfaucon conjectures that they formed a select fraternity.[35] They had such an influence over the Roman people, that when two of them quarrelled, Augustus interfered to renew their friendship.  Pylades was one of them; and he observed to the emperor, that nothing could be more useful to him than that the people should be perpetually occupied with the squabbles between him and Bathyllus!  The advice was accepted, and the emperor was silenced.

The parti-coloured hero, with every part of his dress, has been drawn out of the great wardrobe of antiquity:  he was a Roman Mime.  HARLEQUIN is described with his shaven head, rasis capitibus; his sooty face, fuligine faciem obducti; his flat, unshod feet, planipedes; and his patched coat of many colours, Mimi centunculo.[36] Even Pullicinella, whom we familiarly call PUNCH, may receive, like other personages of not greater importance, all his dignity from antiquity; one of his Roman ancestors having appeared to an antiquary’s visionary eye in a bronze statue; more than one erudite dissertation authenticates the family likeness; the nose long, prominent, and hooked; the staring goggle eyes; the hump at his back and at his breast; in a word, all the character which so strongly marks the Punch-race, as distinctly as whole dynasties have been featured by the Austrian lip and the Bourbon nose.[37]