INCREDVLVS ODI: HORACE AND THE SUBLITERARY AESTHETIC OF THE AUGUSTAN STAGE

Abstract

Starting from the comparative standpoint of elite hostility to nineteenth-century British melodrama, this article posits pantomime's ‘melodramatic’ mode of exhibitionist excess as one of the missing links in the landscape against which Horace composed his Ars poetica. It suggests that lines 182–8 of the Ars that disapprove the display of death, violence and physical impossibilities on the tragic stage may be better understood as Horace's hostile response to pantomime's increasing prominence in Roman theatrical life, more precisely to the dislocation of ‘horror’ and ‘marvel’ from the realm of the ‘heard’ to that of the ‘seen’ favoured by the pantomime genre.