Perhaps, along with the Olympic Games, the theater is the only public interest from Antiquity that has survived almost intact to this day. Rome, since it conquered Greece and assimilated its extraordinary cultural legacy as its own, began to value theater as a natural form of civic expression, a way to temporarily free itself from the painful day-to-day with the vicissitudes or banalities of a group of actors. willing to distract the public with their accused declamations, nothing valued. By the way, actor was one of the most demeaning professions of the time.
Roman theater of Mérida
Such a sparse and ungrateful public activity did not allow for the flourishing of new authors, so the theatrical offer was subordinated to Latin translations of classic Greek works, losing much of its hilarity or sensitivity in the process. So it was until a certain Titus Macius Plautus , a veteran auxiliary of the Punic Wars, revolutionized the theatrical offer of the city. Plautus, after years of hardship, renewed the Latin theater with his purely Roman comedies which, lacking Greek refinement, sarcastically transferred the idiosyncrasies of the people of his time without resorting to copies of Greek plays. These were hard times for Rome and its rulers did not ask for tragedies, citizens had to be encouraged. Obscenities and rudeness, delirious situations, slaves, dirty old men, merchants, sailors, prostitutes, soldiers, youngsters, flutists, all of them starred in his hilarious comedies.
Why is theater performed with two masks?
Since ancient Greece, the good acoustics of the theaters, perhaps enhanced later thanks to the masterful proportions of Vitruvius, favored their declamations being heard from any corner of the venue, but it was more difficult to be able to clearly see the gestures of the actors. That is why the masks with which today we continue to identify the world of theater, comedy and tragedy, Dionysus and Thanatos, the joy of living and death, the two timeless extremes of existence, became so popular.
And the actors?
With few exceptions, it was only men who played all the roles, whether male or female, and, as we have already said, their work was not well regarded by the population. According to the book Happy Sayings , written under the pseudonym Víctor Amiano , tragic actors wore the cothurnus , footwear with a thick cork sole that made them look taller and from which the expression «de alto coturno comes. » (high class). On the other hand, comedians used the soccus , from which our clog derives. By metonymy, the whole took the name of a part and began to be called soccus to comedians. And just like the comedians did on stage, the fool and the clueless, «play the soccus » came to mean «play dumb or clueless ». From soccus to Swedish -"doing the Swedish"-, going through the clog, there is only one language that is difficult to understand and that makes us put the same face of Alfredo Landa in the Benidorm of the sixties.